Supply chain management solutions provider project44 on Tuesday, May 19, said shippers will now have visibility to their global airfreight, groupage, and ocean container activities no matter where in the world.
The additional visibility into air and ocean freight transport modes complements project44’s truckload and less-than-truckload solutions and makes its platform global in scope for shippers and logistics services providers.
“Businesses need a unified view of their end-to-end visibility data for a flexible and agile global supply chain,” said Jett McCandless, project44’s CEO, in a statement.
The Chicago-based company, which started six years ago, first tackled the trucking market and has since expanded across the spectrum of global freight transportation modes. “We realized a single mode or regional coverage cannot provide the full picture,” McCandless said.
“The unified multimodal solution has been project44’s vision since the beginning and the recent COVID-19 events just accelerated the market’s need,” Raji Bedi, the company’s senior vice president of product, told FreightWaves.
For example, Bedi said one of project44’s pharmaceutical customers recently experienced difficulty securing air cargo capacity to ship its healthcare products worldwide.
“They traditionally use commercial airlines for air cargo needs, but as commercial airlines have reduced flights with global travel restrictions, this company had to look to charter flights or use ocean where they have not previously,” Bedi said.
“With project44’s unified multimodal visibility solution, they were able to switch airline providers and maintain the real-time visibility that is essential to their business,” he added. “They were also able to gain visibility into their newly deployed ocean shipments, all through a single application.”
project44 has built an extensive multimodal network that now reaches across more than 48 countries and operates in 16 languages. In addition to North America, the company has continued to expand its presence in Europe.
“To build a supply chain that can withstand today’s unexpected challenges and prepare our business for the future, we need to derive intelligent insights across our logistics network,” said Gregory Pritchard, head of global logistics at Chicago-based biopharmaceutical company AbbVie (NYSE: ABBV) and a user of project44’s platform. “This means one unified view into our shipments regardless of where it is or how it’s getting there.”
project44 pulls together and unifies various freight transport data through its application programming interface (API) tool. For example, the company said it has established connections to more than 100 airlines, allowing shippers to track their airfreight “from take-off to landing.”
According to the company, more than 300 global companies representing $57 billion in freight use project44’s platform to efficiently move their goods globally.
Vishnu Rajamanickam, FreightWaves’s technology reporter, contributed to this article.