Real World Examples of Real-Time Visibility: Retail and eCommerce

  2020-07-27-Retail-BL

Part two of a series featuring different industries and how real-time visibility is transforming their supply chains. Part one covered food & beverage and consumer goods, part three discusses manufacturing, and part four explores logistics services.

Customer expectations for delivery have been growing over the last few years with the emergence of delivery apps and subscription delivery services. While this evolution has touched every industry, including B2C and B2B businesses, retailers and ecommerce companies felt these demand first. Unpredictable market conditions have only added to the mounting list of challenges and pressures for retailers. 

To tackle these pain points, retailers are turning to real-time transportation visibility to provide a better customer experience while also increasing efficiency. project44 has seen this rapid growth first-hand working with more than 300 global enterprise customers, including the world’s top three Fortune 500 companies, the top two retailers in the world, the largest furniture retailer, and Denmark’s largest retailer. 

Responding to Consumer Demands while Mitigating Disruption 

Whether retailers are delivering to customer at home or in store, they need real-time visibility to create experience their customers expect. 

Many retailers are seeing an increase in over-the-road shipment volume compared to earlier this year. According to data from project44, retail in durable goods increased by 31%, grocery increased by 28%, and mixed retail increased by 41% in North America. 

In addition to increased volume, recent research shows that 89% of customers won’t sacrifice visibility into the delivery process during an economic downturn, it’s becoming more important than ever for retailers to implement visibility. 

How a Leading Retailer Is Using Advanced Visibility to Optimize their Network 

One of world’s largest ecommerce company, known as an innovator for delivery experience, faced challenges obtaining accurate visibility into middle mile lanes in Europe. To gain the data and insights needed to optimize their network and ensure the experience their customers expect, they turned to project44 to leverage the largest carrier network. 

The ecommerce retailer struggled to gain accurate insight into the critical pull time (CPT) at fulfillment centers and critical entry time (CET) at sort centers. Without the ability to pinpoint the cause of issues, whether it was a delayed carrier or inefficiencies at the fulfillment or sort center, the retailer could not take action or proactively manage downstream delays. 

They were reliant on manual and incomplete logs as well as self-reported carrier data. With these delays impacting Delivery Estimate Accuracy (DEA), they needed advanced visibility into their middle mile lanes. 

By selecting project44 for their extensive carrier network and high-fidelity tracking, they can determine defect root causes for middle mile freight, which allows them to better evaluate lanes by improving origin, carrier, and destination performance and enhancing processes. With visibility data by lane and by carrier, they are able to investigate trends and partner with the fulfillment centers, carriers, and sort centers to resolve issues with actionable insights. 

Working with project44, they were able to achieve more than 90% compliance across more than 2,500 carriers. Tracking more than 1.5 million shipments annually through project44, they were also able to optimize lane analysis and resolve issues to provide the delivery experience their customers expect. 

Proving Real-Time Transportation Visibility ROI in Retail 

As the need for real-time transportation visibility increases for retailers, it helps to quantify the ROI of a visibility platform and understand all of the value you can gain from a solution. 

Download Gartner’s recent report, How to Assess the Benefits and Return on Investment of a Real-Time Transportation Visibility Platform, to learn more about defining ROI and building a business case for visibility.