ClearMetal Joins the project44 team

  P44-Poplar-Press-Release

In the past year, supply chains have certainly witnessed more significant disruptions than we have seen in our lifetime. We’ve had to deal with demand surges and supply shortages stemming from the Covid-19 pandemic. As supply chain trading partners tried to handle those disruptions and keep inventory flowing in the global pipeline, it showed the need for companies to have robust supplier networks and actionable intelligence to meet and maintain high customer expectations.

Since our founding, project44 has made it our mission to give global supply chains the predictability, efficiency, agility, and resilience to manage disruptions. As the next step in carrying out that mission, we have acquired the software company ClearMetal Inc. based in San Francisco. 

ClearMetal is the dominate leader in the Continuous Delivery Experience (CDX), enabling supply chain organizations to optimize logistics and provide their customers with easy access to trusted, live information about their shipments. The ClearMetal CDX Platform uses proprietary machine learning algorithms to break free from static-visibility paradigms and make sense of supply chain data.

I’m excited about what this acquisition will do to advance our mission. By incorporating ClearMetal into the project44 platform, we will strengthen our real-time advanced visibility solution with several benefits to our customers. 

For starters, we gain the experience and knowledge of one of the best data science and artificial intelligence teams in the logistics space. ClearMetal brings to the project44 team top-notch software engineers, data scientists, and operations researchers from Stanford University, University of Berkeley and Google. This will deepen our AI-based business and market analytic capabilities, which translates into intelligent cost savings for our customers.

Second, the ClearMetal acquisition gives project44 the capability to track the contents of shipments and extend our visibility down to the order and item-level. And that means we can provide our customers a granular picture of inbound shipments managed by suppliers. This will help our customers improve demand forecasting and distribution capabilities across the board. 

Third, we will extend our visibility network to encompass upstream suppliers. As the Covid pandemic has painfully shown, it’s important for companies to have visibility of supplier inventory and transportation movements in order to be pro-active in managing supply to meet upticks in demand. Taken together, these three additions from ClearMetal will bolster project44 and Ocean Insight’s existing strengths as the industry leader in multi-modal visibility and carrier network coverage. 

So, what does this mean for project44 customers? 

The addition of data science expertise from ClearMetal, will enable project44 to offer the best data quality and the most precise multi-modal estimated time of arrivals (ETAs). As I said earlier, supply chain visibility must become more granular if it is to meet our customers’ current and future needs. Instead of just tracking shipment as a unit, we will now be able to track the contents of the shipment, providing visibility of purchase orders, sales orders, and stock transfer orders and custom information that procurement, sales and customer teams care about. 

The extension of upstream visibility to suppliers means that project44 can now offer an end-to-end picture that includes inbound, non-controlled shipments from suppliers.

As a result of this acquisition, in the short term, we will now be able to give companies actionable insights from robust data science for a deeper understanding of supply chain operations and processes so that they can take corrective action in times of crisis. And in the long term, we will help supply chains optimize their logistics network and inventory management to improve the customer experience across all modes globally.

We’ve spent a lot of time this year talking about what we can do to offset volatility and ensure the efficient and timely transportation of our customers’ shipments and we’re excited that ClearMetal is now a part of this solution. ClearMetal’s CEO, Adam Compain and his team have a proven track record of groundbreaking work in the logistics visibility space. Their insight and skill will be put to immediate and effective use here at project44. 

This mission compels project44 to deliver a network platform that features the most advanced visibility, exception management, collaboration, and automated processes across transportation and logistics ecosystems. And so, we welcome the team from ClearMetal into the project44 family, so stay tuned for more great things to come.