- Hello, and welcome to Community Chats.
I'm Aley Hammer, and today we're joined with Ree Ram,
the CEO of iTrazo Tracetech.
Ree, thank you so much for joining me today.
To start, can you share with our audience who is iTrazo
and what services do you guys actually offer?
- Thank you, Aley,
greatly appreciate you having me here today,
and fantastic to be part of this show.
So who is iTrazo?
iTrazo, we are the pioneers
in developing supply chain traceability solutions
to give our customers and brands control
over quality delivery.
So we've developed
our own supply chain traceability platform
called iTrazo ADI.
The ADI stands for active digital identity,
which is attached to every asset, product, or service,
to give cradle-to-grave transparency
of a product and service
as it goes through its entire life cycle.
We are delivering consumer confidence
through real time end-to-end supply chain traceability
for transparency, compliance, and consistent quality.
- And you mentioned that
you developed your traceability platform,
which is called iTrazo ADI.
Can you just elaborate on that a little bit?
So, why did you actually develop your own solution?
- So consumer confidence,
and you as a consumer are fully aware
that growing consumer demands for quality product,
understanding where their products coming from,
the brand protection, the food safety,
the biosecurity issues that are out there
cannot be met by fragmented supply chains,
or inadequate compliance, or lack of quality management.
Hence, we developed a platform
that delivered consumer confidence
through real time end-to-end supply chain traceability
for transparency, compliance, and consistent quality.
We are also offering brand protection.
So, our platform allows brands to protect their reputation
and also protect against product diversion counterfeiting,
do targeted recalls,
and meet their compliance obligations,
and plus create transparency in the supply chain ecosystem.
We've also got, within the whole supply chain at the moment,
we are lacking data sharing.
So where the data producers
and the data consumers meet and trade data,
it's a data trading economy
where we have created this for everybody
that plays a part in the supply chain ecosystem.
On the other hand, as you can see right now,
the supply chain is in chaos caused by the pandemic.
This is another example of why supply chain transparency
is critical to meet the supply chain demand.
- Yeah, absolutely.
It definitely gives consumers confidence
knowing that we have supply chain traceability.
And Ree, why did you select AWS
as your cloud and managed service provider?
- When iTrazo started it's journey in late 2017,
we evaluated different solution architectures
and infrastructure requirements
that would be secure or scalable, easy to maintain,
and cost effective for our customers
and us as a solution provider.
And in that evaluation process,
AWS ticked all the boxes for us to get us started.
The iTrazo ADI platform has several moving parts,
and we are processing huge volumes of data
in billions of transactions
from the entire ecosystem that is involved.
And we are providing information back to our customers
in near real time.
So utilizing data insights, and on top of that,
you know, we use other technologies,
such as AI, machine learning, data encryption.
There's a massive amount of integration work
that goes into setting up a customer.
We are able to build and run that fairly quickly,
without adding additional cost to our customers or to us
by utilizing AWS.
And most importantly,
we need something that is secure.
And security, cybersecurity threats, all of those,
that is so important.
Order scalability is significant
from what we do from a supply chain perspective.
And this is all easy to maintain for us,
running everything on a AWS managed service.
AWS also offered us innovation credit,
which is super helpful when you're starting out
and scraping to save costs when you're a startup.
- Absolutely, the innovation credits
are something that not everybody knows about,
but they are so helpful to start up,
so I'm so glad that you utilize the benefit of them.
And Ree, supply chain traceability
has become more and more in demand, as you mentioned before,
across nearly every single industry.
So, how will iTrazo capture this market,
and how will AWS be able to support you
on the journey of this rapid growth?
- So, firstly, you know,
we have a proven solution in the marketplace,
which is placing us in a high esteem amongst our customers.
We've got name brands
that are already on our production system.
We are selling a solution, not a hype.
It is also critical that we understand our customer needs
and offer more personalized solution,
rather than take the one size fits all approach.
And having AWS at our disposal,
we are able to build and proof
prototypes and solutions quickly,
and take that to market,
and meet the sort of more personalized solution,
or the bespoke solutions
that the supply chain demands.
We've got a highly scalable and secure SAS platform
that is running on AWS, so that's ticking away.
I can sleep better at night
knowing that my customers are gonna be supported
while all their applications and processes
are running in the background.
We've also got employee loyalty
from a technical and support resources,
with capability to scale up quickly,
to support multiple projects.
And we are creating the right ecosystem
amongst our partnerships,
and have a strong management and board and technical team
supporting and building our brand strategy.
- Thank you so much.
And you mentioned that you have well known brands
using your system when we spoke earlier.
So can you share who some of these are?
You know, maybe some of your early adopted customers?
And why did they actually choose iTrazo?
- Well, some of our early adopters
have been in the agriculture sector.
So the agriculture sector
or the food safety/biosecurity concerns
have been driving the traceability,
the supply chain traceability.
So our early adopters have been the likes of Costa Group,
which is a publicly listed company,
and one of the biggest producers
of fresh produce in Australia.
We've got the Chosen Ones,
which is all stone fruits based out of Adelaide.
We've got livestock producers for red meat,
Enduring Station, Grass and Goats, and multiple others.
And we are also onboarding customers
from the manufacturing, fashion, health, and pharmaceutical.
And those industries
are all sort of driven by the same thing
in terms of creating transparency for their industry,
meeting other compliance requirements,
environment sustainability goals.
Let's say pharmaceutical as an example.
Pharmaceutical, by 2024, all prescription drugs
needs to have traceability on their products.
And we are working with that industry
and some of the producers of prescription drugs
in terms of getting traceability.
So, you know, we were very lucky to have Costa Group
as one of our first customers.
We've continued to work with them,
we've continued to evolve our platform in that space.
And we are signing up
almost two to three customers a month at the moment
on our platform.
- Such an exciting space.
Ree, thank you so much.
I always love when a CEO comes on my show,
but even more so when it's a female in the tech space.
And, you know, when we were chatting earlier,
you mentioned that 80% of your staff are female.
That is so cool in this space,
'cause we do know there is a little bit
of a gender discrepancy,
so thank you so much for sharing your company
and what you guys are doing.
It sounds like you've got an amazing future ahead.
And if anyone has any questions
about traceability or iTrazo,
please pop them in the comment section below,
and we'll get back to you.
Thank you much.
- Thank you, Aley.
Thank you, appreciate your time,
and thank you for the opportunity.