Supply chain visibility software

01 What is Supply Chain Visibility Software?

Supply chain visibility software is cutting-edge technology that optimizes logistics by integrating real-time shipment tracking with powerful analytics and operations capabilities to help transform your supply chain. Supply Chain visibility solutions leverage GPS/ELD devices on vehicles to provide the most up-to-date information on shipments in motion.  

Supply Chain Visibility Solutions Should Have:  

Multimodal
Visibility into all modes of transportation including trucking, rail, ocean, air transportation 

End-to-End
Monitoring of all stages of your supply chain, from raw material procurement to your customer’s doorstep

Quality & Compliance Monitoring
Real-time insights to prevent product quality and compliance issues  

Supplier Performance Metrics
Monitoring of supplier performance with actionable insights 

Responsive
Decision-Making
Real-time data enabling quick decisions in response to changes in demand, disruptions, or unexpected events 

Modes of supply chain visibility

Supply chain visibility is essential to ensure that products move efficiently and safely from the point of origin to the final destination. This is accomplished by integrating directly with carriers, forwarders, NVOCCs, and other data providers. 

Each mode of visibility in the supply chain—ocean, air, rail, truck, facilities, terminals, and ports—plays a crucial role in ensuring efficient and safe operations. The integration of advanced technologies, such as AI, IoT, and visibility platforms, is essential to optimize management and overcome the challenges of the modern supply chain.

Learn More

Since ocean is the most common and cost-effective method for shipping large quantities of goods internationally, real-time visibility for shipments moving via sea is critical for global supply chains. 

Ocean Visibility

Learn More

Visibility in air transport is essential for high-value or time-sensitive goods. Real-time visibility ensures that shippers and recipients know the location and status. 

Visibility in air transport

Learn More

When it comes to choosing between rail and truckload transit, rail is the more sustainable and cost-effective choice. But without visibility, you end up sacrificing on predictability. Get the best of all worlds with real-time visibility for every rail shipment with wagon-level granularity and predictive ETAs, dramatically increasing reliability of rail transit. 

Rail Visibility

Learn More

Visibility in road transport is critical for last-mile delivery and the movement of goods across land regions. 

Visibility in road transport

Learn More

Visibility in facilities, such as warehouses and distribution centers, is crucial for efficient inventory and operations management. 

Supply chain visibility

Learn More

Cargo terminals, especially in ports and airports, are critical transshipment points in the supply chain. Visibility at these points ensures smooth operations. 

Cargo terminals

Learn More

Port visibility is essential for managing the movement of goods through port facilities, which are crucial entry and exit points in global trade. 

Port visibility

02 Features of Supply Chain Visibility Solutions 

When evaluating Supply Chain Visibility Solutions, you should look for the following critical features:  

Inventory visibility  

Associate shipments with orders and the SKUs in them so your teams can find the information they need by the identifier that matters most to them. 

Modal stitching  

Track shipments from door-to-door, including AI-powered ETAs for the milestones that matter most, with every leg stitched together in a single easy-to-parse view. 

Robust analytics 

Get real-time and historic insights about your shipments, carriers, and lanes for better decision-making.  

Shared visibility  

Grant visibility access to anyone who needs it, including internal teams, customers, or partners. Whether you want to share details of a single order or shipment, or automatically share based on set rules, the right visibility solution should be able to do it.  

Carrier tools  

Products like self-service onboarding, shipment analytics, tracking quality diagnostics, and more help carriers provide high-quality tracking data. 

Data quality dashboards  

All network parties can self-serve to diagnose and fix common tracking issues with ML-powered insights about carrier performance. 

03 Benefits of supply chain visibility

The right visibility software leverages real-time data from GPS, ELD, and telematics networks, combining it with historical machine-learning analytics to generate highly accurate arrival times. 

Benefits of a supply chain visibility solution include:

Real-time
visibility

Detailed, real-time, end-to-end, order-level visibility tracks all inventory in motion, across all modes and all geographies. 

Centralized
workflow

Transportation execution is improved thanks to a centralized workflow for procuring rates and tendering bookings across all modes, with access to a dynamic carrier network and insights like reliability and tracking quality metrics. 

Smart
facilities

Smart, automated facilities and yards that streamline appointment scheduling and gate check-in/out processes make it easy to know how much labor to allocate for a variety of yard activities, so you can reduce trailer wait times at the gate and better track assets in the yard (e.g., loading/unloading, assigning dock doors to trailers, identifying priority shipments). 

Improved customer experience 

The last mile of shipping leverages eCommerce logistics, real-time visibility and exception management to deliver a superior CX (e.g., proactive shipment notifications and requests for clarifications delivered in real time to each customer’s preferred communication channel). 

But expectations like those are unrealistic if you’re using old supply chain systems and processes. That’s because:

Siloed data is incomplete, hard to access and terribly difficult to unify
Too many critical roes rely on guesswork in lieu of real-time data and insights
Supply chain workers are stuck in old, manual ways of doing things take much longer to do everything that needs to be done

At project44, we refer to these obstacles and inefficiencies that slow down or disrupt the smooth flow of goods, information or finances through the supply chain as “supply chain friction.”  

Supply chain friction manifests a whole host of critical business problems — things like higher facility overhead costs and the inability to: view inventory in motion; obtain real-time, bookable rates for carriers on specific lanes; and proactively resolve exceptions for your customers.  

Because of supply chain friction, supply chain leaders like you never have enough information to know exactly what needs to be done. When looking for a supply chain visibility solution, ensure that the solution can help you overcome this friction.  

05 Visibility customer use cases

End-to-end visibility is the best way to combat the biggest challenges facing your supply chain today: operational inefficiency from incomplete data and overreliance on manual processes, high costs from fees and frequent expedites, inability to accurately plan inventory, and lost business from failure to meet customer expectations. But don’t just take our word for it—read how others have used supply chain visibility solutions to achieve high-velocity supply chain operations. 

Tailored Brands

Visibility is the most important factor when it comes to business performance in a retail organization, knowing where your product is and when it will land, allows you to be more efficient with costs. Companies that have a handle on the visibility of their products are always going to perform better than those who don’t.

Jamie Bragg
CSCO/EVP at Tailored Brands

100%

increased receipt plans—up from 60%

90%

improved carrier compliance

Efret

Our partnership with project44 allows us to provide detailed tracking information to our customers including where a load has been, where it’s stopped, and where it’s headed. All of this is done via a seamless integration between project44 and our own telematics system. This automatic process frees up time for our team to focus on customer support, enablement, and new business.

Alex Paterson
Business Development
Efret 

06 project44 Visibility in Movement

project44’s supply chain visibility Software is designed to work with you. Movement by project44 is an advanced visibility platform, API-first, and delivers a cutting-edge technology for how you work: whether in a TMS, other system, or using our user interface.

All of it is possible because only project44: 

01

Combines automation with embedded ML algorithms to reduce supply chain friction and achieve high velocity

02

Has unified and integrated more of the supply chain than any other company in history 

03

Maintains the largest carrier network in existence today (e.g., tracks more than one billion shipments annually across more than 246,000 carriers, tracks 99% of last-mile carriers in the USA and operates in over 180 countries and over 20 languages) 

04

Applies patented AI algorithms to the world’s largest ocean data set to deliver predictive insights — including ETAs — that are more timely, complete and accurate than those provided by carriers 

05

Integrates with carriers, forwarders and NVOCCs, so you have granular visibility from origin to destination — including pre- and on-carriage moves — in a single view and can link shipments to orders with SKU-level detail for unmatched management of inventory in transit 

06

Has developed a connected ecosystem consisting of more than 2,100 telematics and more than 80 TMS/ERP integrations; more than 10 billion monthly supply chain data points; the world’s only visibility into/out of China; and global partnerships with SAP, LBN, OTM, BlueYonder and Google 

Ready to put your supply chain in hyper drive?

Connect with a visibility expert to learn what project44 can do you for your business.