Logistics visibility in supply chain management gives shippers a full view of data gathered across their network for the best insights and decision-making.
While different parts of the supply chain and associated data can be disconnected, incompatible, and not accessible, a transportation management system (TMS) solves these problems and supports supply chain resiliency through logistics visibility.
How a TMS Provides Logistics Visibility
Increasing visibility is one of the essential uses of transportation management systems. The TMS provides real-time awareness of trucks and freight and their position in the shipment life cycle. Improved ETAs and visibility support carriers’ ability to meet delivery windows. Shippers can provide better customer service to expectant receivers with that level of awareness.
The Visibility Features to Expect in a TMS
- Pricing Visibility: Gain real-time pricing, plus the TMS matches your target rate and service requirements with available capacity.
- Carrier Visibility: Communications and Documentation: Receive carrier updates and share documents through effective two-way communication within the TMS.
- Control Tower for Operational and Data Visibility: Gain visualizations on a map that shows adverse events impacting shipping so you can better plan the suitable carriers and partners required to execute a shipment in a given situation and location.
- Customer Visibility via Customer Portals: MercuryGate’s logistics visibility platform includes customer portals designated for each customer. This gives customers visibility to their information while keeping your data sets separate and private.
- Workflow Visibility: Dynamic workflows help you manage priorities and keep your sight on them while making it easier to manage exceptions faster when they occur.
- Data Visibility via Integrations: Use logistics integrations to bring data together and gain complete visibility.
- Scenario Planning Visibility: Through MercuryGate’s logistics visibility software, you’re able to simulate your transportation network to gain a better view of future possibilities. Advanced simulation through the TMS relies on data for optimal forecasting.
- Global Sourcing & Compliance: MercuryGate’s transportation management solutions support product sourcing and compliance through automated monitoring, measurement, and validation of each product and supplier’s compliance.
Benefits of Logistics Visibility
- Better Ability to Manage Timeframes: Through real-time information, you can perform better load planning, risk mitigation strategies, and interventions as needed, which creates improved timeframe management.
- Better Product Flow: You can use the system to gain visibility into product flow factors like the movement of raw materials and finished goods.
- Better Dock Schedules: Improved dock scheduling and load staging help you make decisions in real-time and move freight faster.
- Better Supply Chain Replenishment Processes: Improving replenishment processes by using data creates benefits like reduced costs, enhanced customer service, minimized risk of disruption, and more certainty.
- Better Claims Management Processes: When a shipment is delivered late, data visibility in a unified system helps shippers see active service guarantees and quickly determine whether and what they are owed.
- Better Compliance: Through centralized transportation management, you gain a record of transactions you can access and generate for better process compliance from end-to-end across your supply chain.
- Better Relationships: Real-time data improves processes for drivers, which develops better trucker-shipper relationships. A significant benefit is higher tender acceptance and pick-up rates. This can also lead to a shipper-of-choice designation that benefits the shipper, receiver, and carrier.
- Better Use of Systems and Technology: Real-time systems and advanced technologies like machine learning and big data analytics directly contribute to continuous shipping improvements.
Calculate your potential Saving While Using an enterprise TMS
Learn More About Real-Time Visibility
Visibility into all parts of logistics management creates massive benefits. A TMS provides the means for gaining better visibility through your supply chain network data.
Significant advancements in technology and data collection continue to improve visibility. Yet with disparate systems, data often end up separate, flawed, and difficult to compare. Integrating with a TMS brings siloed data together to gain a holistic view and improve supply chain logistics management.
Download our eBook to learn more about real-time logistics visibility.
