Shipping cargo from point A to point B is rarely a straightforward process. Roadblocks can take the form of everything from inclement weather to congested ports or even cargo theft attempts. These delays can result in unhappy customers, or even spoiled products. But with shipment visibility tools, you’ll gain immediate insight into these events so that you can quickly intervene and course correct.
What is a shipment visibility tool?
Shipment visibility tools are true to their name: they provide visibility into shipments across air, road, rail, and ocean. At Overhaul, these insights are delivered in real time and can be shared with customers and partners. This helps increase on time performance, reduce dwell time, and prevent avoidable fees.
Along with shipment tracking, real time shipment visibility tools should also make it easy to identify and manage risk. This means enabling you to see different elements that could impact your shipment and supply chain performance. Some of these elements may include weather hazards, route deviations, or high-crime areas. You should also be able to access this data wherever your shipment goes, regardless of time of day or country.
Overall, shipment visibility software should offer real time data to improve efficiency, protect cargo, and deliver a better overall customer experience. Overhaul’s Shipment Manager helps you do all this and more by offering milestone visibility for periodic updates. It also integrates smoothly with our Command Center to track performance.
These are a just few of the foundational capabilities you should consider when picking a shipment visibility provider.
Choosing the right shipment visibility solution
Go beyond supply chain visibility
Transportation visibility can greatly impact your wider supply chain. For this reason, it’s important to pick a shipment transportation visibility platform with the capabilities you’re looking for. While all platforms should offer multimodal visibility, risk insights, and the other features mentioned above, the simple fact is, they don’t.
Some shipment visibility tools simply begin and end with visibility. They allow you to see what’s happening with your cargo but provide no tools to intervene when something goes wrong. They may also lack the data to help you proactively prepare your shipments against risk.
Unlike these companies, Overhaul’s Shipment Manager helps you maintain product quality via our time- and temperature-sensitive (TTS) capabilities. We also enable you to track customer orders down to SKUs. You can then share information on shipment routes, status, and ETAs. You’ll also receive early warning notifications of threats to your shipment’s ETA. You can then escalate events with Overhaul partners to consistently improve OTP.
Real time freight visibility for global supply chains
Overhaul’s Shipment Manager helps you consolidate your entire global, multimodal logistics operation in a single application. We make it easy to better visualize your shipment’s progress via our map view. Here, you can find your shipment’s origin, destination, planned stops, and current location.
We also provide traffic overlays to help preemptively course correct shipments that are headed toward heavy traffic. Additionally, you can quickly locate places where drivers typically stop, such as gas stations, by selecting our points of interest overlay. Shipment Manager even allows you to see events that have happened across your shipment’s journey, including when and where they took place. This allows you to understand events as they happen and dissect what went right and wrong for future travel.
Other key capabilities for shipment visibility tools
Making data comprehensible and actionable is table stakes for any supply chain visibility software. However, specific companies might benefit from even greater support. For example, a pharmaceutical company may require product-level insights in order to avoid temperature deviations. Other companies may need to share data quickly in order to stay on schedule and focus on exception management.
Shipment Manager allows you to enable countdown timers for shipments that use temperature-controlled packaging. This ensures that you know the remaining duration of protection and can act swiftly in the event of a delay. You can also share key information with stakeholders, including internal teams, external partners, and customers. This will allow you to all stay on the same page and come together for decision-making.
Shipment Manager also records and displays high-level details of past and present shipments, offering easily accessible, concise, and transparent data. Our quick filters feature helps locate shipments instantly with the ability to narrow in on specific carriers, drivers, ETAs, and shipment statuses. From there, you have the option to navigate to our risk monitoring app to view your shipment from a risk mitigation perspective.
In short, we make it easy to see, understand, and share the data you need to keep shipments on track. We’re also constantly adapting our solution to provide the best data in the most digestible, beneficial manner possible – which is a must for any visibility tool.
Shipment Manager’s redesign
Overhaul’s Shipment Manager is now better than ever. Thanks to a recent redesign, it’s even easier to locate shipments, quickly determine their expected arrival times, and track their progress in accordance with set plans. In short, our new features will provide even more visibility capabilities for supply chain managers. They’ll be better equipped to track and trace shipments, avoid delays, and meet compliance goals.
For more information about shipment visibility platforms, here are five questions to consider when picking your RTTVP. If you’d like to learn more about Overhaul’s freight tracking solutions, reach out to us today.
