Challenge:
Emerson’s Cold Chain business needed a way to better capture and share the data created by its refrigeration products and IoT sensors.

Solution:
Emerson uses Domo to capture and process all its data, and then uses Domo Everywhere to share that data back with customers.

Impact:
Customers can now use self-serve analytics to track and verify temperatures across the entire perishable goods supply chain.

Emerson powers the perishable supply chain with Domo.

Emerson’s Cold Chain business helps businesses ranging from dairies to convenience stores to pharmaceutical manufacturers to not only keep their perishable products at the perfect temperature, but ensure those products stay at that temperature as they travel throughout the supply chain. Real-time traceability throughout the global perishable supply chain keeps your ice cream solid, your food safe, and critical vaccines viable as they make their way from the lab to the pharmacy.

Emerson relies on Domo to capture the data its technology creates to ensure its products operate at peak performance. In addition, Domo Everywhere lets Emerson share this data back to customers so that they can track and verify temperatures across the supply chain for themselves. Dashboards turn the raw data into easily understandable insights that customers can use to make decisions.

“The data that’s typically been presented from our world have been from a very engineering-oriented mindset, but it doesn’t answer our customer’s questions unless they have a lot of domain expertise,” explained Paul Hepperla, VP Solution Strategy, Cold Chain at Emerson. “Now they can look and see exactly what the issue is. Domo lets us extract our domain expertise and makes it very simple to pop those answers out.”

In addition to using Domo to provide more insight to customers, Emerson leverages the data it collects in Domo to serve its customers smarter, ultimately improving the customer experience and allowing it to grow its relationships.

“With almost everything creating data, we’re able to quickly go through the different architectures of refrigeration systems to give our customers guidance on which one performs best from a total cost of ownership perspective,” said Kurt Knapke, VP Solution Strategy, Cold Chain at Emerson.

With Domo, Emerson can now utilize its data to help customers improve their temperature insights while scaling their use of refrigeration to get products to end users faster. As a result, Emerson has been able to redefine its relationship with customers from a product provider to a business partner.

“Getting us closer to our customers has been one of our biggest transformations,” Hepperla said. “I heard from one of our partners in the healthcare space that the work we’ve been doing over the last five weeks leveraging Domo has been the most exciting work he’s seen us do in the last ten years.”

“To me, that’s a testament that says we’re doing the right thing. We’re using the right technology, but even more so, we have the right philosophy about how to solve the problem.”

Optimizing IoT.

To ensure a consistently cold temperature across the supply chain, Emerson relies heavily on IoT sensors embedded into its equipment. These sensors not only track the temperature of the air, but simulate the temperature of products so customers can be confident that everything keeps cold. A product’s temperature can be measured in real-time from the second it gets on a truck to when it’s loaded onto an ocean cargo container to when it makes its way onto a store cooler shelf.

Emerson uses Domo to enable self-serve analytics so its internal staff can better understand how its products are used. “I want our internal teams to be able to do more of their own discovery and get curious about what’s going on in their part of the business,” said Charles Larkin, Director, Data Analytics at Emerson. “I also want the same thing with our customer. I want them to get curious about what’s going on. And we know they don’t have all the time to dedicate to their cold chains; they have other things they’re focused on. That’s where we can come in and help them solve their problems.”

Making marketing pay.

In addition to using Domo to help customers and internal teams track temperature data, Emerson uses Domo to manage its critical business and operations data. For example, the marketing team uses Domo to track how its marketing spend impacts business performance.

Emerson connected Domo to its marketing automation system, ERP, content centralization platform and social media platforms. This lets the marketing team track and optimize how and where they are communicating so they can focus on their most productive content and channels.