The current challenge for any supply chain is to be faster and more transparent than ever before, while continuing to remain profitable and productive. True visibility across the supply chain plays a major factor in optimizing performance, namely because true visibility doesn’t just show dots on a map, but it provides insight into less visible areas—such as accurate estimated time of arrivals (ETA).
Through the combination of big data, supply chain analytics, and advanced technology, you now have the power to obtain complete visibility within your supply chain due to real-time, dynamic operational intelligence that provides accurate shipment ETAs —enabling you to plan for and respond to supply chain challenges and disruptions.
Even with precise planning, things go wrong. This is why the potential for true visibility and accurate ETA is so important for supply chain dependent organizations. Many organizations perform the same shipments routinely, yet they are still using estimated time of arrivals (ETAs) that don’t take into account hiccups that may or may not occur during a shipment, such as traffic, logistical delays, stops for breaks, and other disruptions. This causes late shipments, cross docking issues, as well as wasted time and money. When it comes to running your operations smoothly, these disruptions (or the lack of) in your logistics planning should be taken into account when providing an accurate ETA.
Advanced technology has the ability to analyze real-time and historical data to aid your supply chain planning efforts. It analyzes route history, mode of transportation, environment, driver behavior, and other data in order to accurately predict arrival of goods at plants, distribution centers, and retail stores as well as to solve inventory management, cross docking, and on-time delivery challenges.
As a result, you will be able to identify key areas to optimize your supply chain and reduce operating costs. For example, you will gain actionable intelligence that will help you make decisions around:
- which types of shipments to expedite,
- which carriers have capacity,
- which ports appear to be congested,
- what shipping routes are best for air, rail, and road, and
- what time is best for clearing customs.
With true visibility and accurate ETA, you will increase profitability and productivity by gaining the knowledge to plan better in order to lower transportation costs, improve cross docking, minimize out-of-stocks, increase inventory turns, and improve service levels.