Companies rely on real-time shipment visibility to make strategic operational decisions and manage customer expectations. Gaining access to that visibility, however, can be a challenge. High-quality visibility vendors deliver tremendous value by delivering actionable insights to customers, yet the key to gaining that value lies in the opportunity for companies to get their carriers to properly feed data to their visibility vendor of choice. Taking advantage of these opportunities requires shippers, vendors and carriers to work together.
Currently, common misconceptions around data quality and connectivity stand in the way of maximizing the value shippers and LSPs can gain from visibility vendors’ offerings and can lead to undue frustration. To realize full value, shippers should understand where data issues come, how to utilize their commercial relationships with carriers, and how best to use the technology and know-how of best-in-class visibility vendors.
“In ocean shipping, often between 15% and 40% of carrier data can be erroneous. And in ocean visibility, over 90% of visibility data is sourced from third parties. Because of this, software vendors are key for protecting against low quality industry data and gaining enhanced visibility. But it’s critical that shippers ensure their carriers are both connected to and providing a baseline of quality data to their visibility vendor,” said Adam Compain, SVP of Product Marketing at project44.
The myriad of sources for visibility data are difficult for any shipper or 3PL to aggregate, filter, normalize, and enhance. After sourcing the data, the data errors that stem from ocean carriers and the logistics providers they rely on can be highly misleading: mislabeled events, conflicting timestamps, missing transshipments, incorrect delivery events and bill of lading numbers. These issues make it difficult for companies to optimal decisions and they also create challenges when communicating with end-customers. Beyond this, the technology, products, and services required to convert real-time visibility into actionable intelligence and value is a highly complex effort requiring industry professionals to leverage the best software available.
project44 has developed the technology, products, and services necessary to deliver this best-in-class visibility. The company’s technology aggregates, normalizes, and enhances industry data– both filtering out bad data to protect customers as well as providing enhanced data to ensure the most accurate and actionable data possible. Products range from global multi-modal visibility to identifying the root-cause of the issues that may prevent it. And new Managed Services, Support, and a globally distributed team with local know-how, partners with supply chain teams to ensure maximum value and digital transformation.
What’s notable is that project44 is an extremely open visibility vendor. Adverse to the lock-in that can result from closed ecosystems, project44 was built API-first to agnostically integrate with any IT system used. The company is further willing to connect to any carrier a customer uses, regardless of the quality of data provided by that carrier.
To punctuate the data enhancements made by project44 platform called Movement, the company has historically shared the following statistics about its ocean visibility data quality improvements beyond carrier-sourced data. More recently discussed several enhancements to its suite of International Visibility products and their underlying data quality and ETA algorithms.
- Completeness — 110% more complete for key events
- Accuracy — up to 50% data quality accuracy improvement
- Latency — 83% less latency in key milestone events
- Fidelity — 20% improvement in predictions through higher fidelity data
While data quality issues are common in logistics, shippers are often insulated from these issues by the efforts of their visibility vendors.
“project44 does a tremendous amount to protect the customer from the industry’s data errors by automatically identifying, filtering, and/or correcting the data in real-time” Compain said. “Often shippers and LSPs are unaware this is happening in the background to the point where a mismatch between our data and the carrier website is confused for a shortcoming when, in fact, we’ve purposefully omitted the (misleading) data.”
For many other shippers, it’s a common pitfall to believe their visibility issue is a matter of vendor data quality when in fact the underlying challenge is carrier connectivity. “Connectivity issues are common,” Complain said. “Companies tend to assume they are receiving low-quality data when in fact carrier data is being sent incorrectly or not at all.” Due to the commercial relationship between shippers and carriers, many shippers are finding it most effective to directly ask their carrier to better connect with their visibility providers rather than requesting the visibility vendor be wholly responsible for establishing and ensuring a strong ongoing connection.
Some have provided the following analogy: if a shipper spoke on the phone with their carrier, and the conversation was in gibberish or foreign language, it wouldn’t be a good use of the customer’s time to call their telecom provider (e.g. Verizon) and demand a coherent conversation; after all, there is little Verizon could do. Instead, the customer would be most effective by calling management at that shipping carrier and requesting that their customer service representatives speak coherently.
This is not to say visibility vendors are absolved from needing to ensure connectivity and quality. Just the opposite: active participation by all participants in the ecosystem is required for shippers and LSPs to gain maximum value from their visibility vendor. It takes a village to gain visibility, and the shippers that are involved in ongoing conversations with their carrier partners to ensure both connectivity and quality, see the best results.
Shippers tend to get faster results than vendors when it comes to requesting greater connectivity because they are able to leverage their commercial partnerships. While vendors can — and do — build relationships with carriers, requests from shippers themselves can take priority due to the nature of that commercial relationship. This combination of strong relationships paired with visibility vendor software seems to be increasingly the winning combination in this industry’s digital transformation.
While shippers, vendors and carriers can work together to drive visibility improvements, it is also important to consider the vast changes that have occurred: not too long ago, having real-time visibility into ocean shipments was regarded as a far-fetched dream. Now it is an accessible reality for most shippers and, depending on the visibility vendor, global, multimodal, and real-time visibility at the inventory level can now be achieved from a single screen.
