Note: Today’s post is part of our “Editor’s Choice” series where we highlight recent posts published by our sponsors that provide supply chain insights and advice. Today’s article comes from Matt Elenjickal, Founder and CEO at FourKites, and looks at redefining real-time visibility.

When you look at the real-time supply chain visibility market of several years ago, it was all about solving or addressing foundational use cases: Where’s my shipment? What’s my ETA? What’s the dwell time? Now, not only must a real-time visibility platform deliver on these use cases, but we must help shippers understand the impact of ETAs and dwell times. Smart shippers are no longer looking to simply track their shipments; they’re seeking help with complex use cases, including optimizing labor scheduling, managing safety stock, inventory planning and more.

The fact of the matter is, to solve these complex use cases, you have to integrate with more than just a TMS or an ERP. And you have to build new applications that synthesize supply chain visibility data from multiple sources to help customers with rapid and intelligent decision execution.

More than answering “What’s the ETA?”, companies need to operationalizes supply chain visibility to help frontline teams execute more quickly and accurately. Rather than relying on logistics teams to interpret data and translate it for other core stakeholders, you need deep, actionable data insights to customer success, inventory, production and procurement teams. By extending visibility to upstream processes, you can predict risks and help teams prevent disruptions even before a shipment is created.

Already, we see shippers using these deeper insights to set their strategy. Imagine having the real-time network data and insights needed to:

• Assess risk, ranging from potential order fulfillment misses to inventory stockouts
• Quantify the potential monetary impacts when a customer order is in jeopardy
• Expedite needed material to fulfill an order or reposition inventory from another location
• Push back on unrealistic customer expectations

This empowers teams to quickly evaluate their full scope of options and potential impacts to avoid costly escalations.

To read the full article, click HERE.