Closely tracking imports from source to destination is akin to a logistics holy grail, offering shippers the possibility of improved supply chain reliability, predictability, and the chance to squeeze costs.
Yet, even as technology advances, visibility platforms have yet to fulfill the needs of their users.
In this article, we’ll explain why current supply chain visibility solutions are not delivering and what you can do to get a full picture of your supply chain.
The problem with your current visibility solution
There is no shortage of visibility solutions in the marketplace. Their features typically include some mixture of digital services such as shipment or container tracking, view analytics, automated estimation of a container’s arrival time, and easy compilation and delivery of reports.
For all the technology employed, however, importers remain frustrated with the products for many reasons:
- It’s difficult to obtain accurate, timely end-to-end data, with some parts of the supply chain providing it willingly, and others delivering patchy, low-grade information that is tough to obtain and use.
- When shippers finally get the data, they often find it’s in multiple, not-very compatible formats, from spreadsheets and emails, to ERP or other forms.
- Collaboration between different entities in the chain, so important to internal and external coordination, is a constant challenge; simple questions about inventory can take hours to resolve.
The result is that most visibility products deliver considerable opacity and far less visibility than shippers want and need.
Business teams don’t have a clear perspective on shipment status, and operation and finance personnel lack easy, direct access to shipment data. That severely impacts a shipper’s ability to plan, making them vulnerable to demurrage and detention penalties, which play havoc with the bottom line.
Shippers, who really need to predict delivery within a 48-to 72-hour window, instead get highly inaccurate predictions that may only include departure and arrival times, and no estimate of when the shipment pass milestones along the way.
How to get a complete picture of your supply chain
Here at Shippabo, we believe that what is needed is a transparency tool that’s focused less on a close-up snapshot of where things are at the moment and instead provides a holistic, big-picture view of the advance of your shipments.
As Dan Krause, Shippabo’s vice-president of products put it recently, “One of the things that we identified as not really being present yet in the industry is the ability to close that gap between having lots of really pretty graphs and lots and lots of data, and actually winding up with recommendations as to how you can actually change your logistics pipeline to improve things.”
Shippabo View provides end-to-end insight on every product in all your shipments and gives a centralized point of information that can be shared across the organization. That enables faster decision-making and, with sophisticated tools for messaging and notifications, can be used for global team collaboration, including with partners, vendors, and customers.
Along with the big picture, Shippabo View includes:
- SKU and inventory tools that provide visibility of ongoing shipments at ground level that can help drive down carrying costs.
- End-to-end visibility, regardless of whether Shippabo or another forwarder arranged the moves.
- Easy-to-understand predicted vs actual performance data.
This combination of tools enables shippers to integrate their entire supply chain into a single, collaborative platform. Its easy customizability enables team members inside and outside your logistics team to focus on the issues and data they need, and provides everybody with the clear vision needed along the supply chain to make timely, well-informed decisions.
Check out Shippabo View if you’re looking to get the complete picture of your supply chain.
