2020 has been a pivotal year for supply chains as digitalization and visibility efforts accelerate to gain much-needed agility. As global supply chains have been working to remain resilient and rework their networks, project44 has been striving to deliver the visibility enhancements needed to keep their business moving forward in today’s world.
In the Spring, project44 announced global and multimodal product expansions to enable supply chains with a unified view into their data. The Fall release extends the multimodal and global real-time transportation visibility offering by streamlining the process — from integration time and lifecycle automation to order-level visibility and collaboration.
Here are a few of the enhancements in project44’s Fall release.
Order and Inventory Visibility
Different departments within an organization use various disconnected systems and identifiers — such as purchase order, SKU, BOL, and more — to track a physical good throughout the lifecycle of a shipment.
Each team has a unique and specific need. For example, transportation teams use a bill of lading (BOL) to track an order or shipment while merchandising and procurement teams use a purchase order (PO). Supply chains are either left with siloed and inconsistent information, or they spend time completing the manual and cumbersome task of associating load numbers with POs across systems.
project44’s enhanced order and inventory visibility solution improves operational efficiency, on-time delivery and proactive decision making by providing a single view of associated SKUs, orders and shipments, while also predicting risk based on the industry’s only health scoring algorithm.
Order and inventory visibility offers value for organizations beyond the transportation team, delivering more predictive insight to merchandising and procurement teams as well. By automating the PO process, project44 can reduce average PO processing time by about 20%, driving efficiency for supply chains.
Deeper Predictive Insights Across Modes
Global organizations need enriched data and deeper predictive capabilities to discover and share actionable insights. project44’s latest release delivers enhanced multimodal predictive insights.
project44 is continuing to expand ocean capabilities by leveraging ocean carrier schedule data to improve ETA accuracy and provide configurable alerts for efficient exception management and the reduction of bottlenecks in international and multimodal supply chains.
Additionally, project44 enhancements deliver real-time condition monitoring with configurable alerts to ensure regulatory compliance and significantly improve cold chain visibility in temperature-sensitive shipments. This is essential for food and beverage, CPG, pharmaceutical companies, and any other organizations shipping perishable goods.
Tighter Collaboration with Carriers
Success in an ever evolving and uncertain world demands collaboration. As supply chains look beyond their four walls for visibility across their ecosystem, carrier connectivity and collaboration are driving factors.
Transportation carriers now have access to a unique set of tools including a purpose-built, carrier-centric interface within project44’s Visibility Operations Center™ (VOC). In the VOC carriers can visualize all current and past shipment data along with benchmarks broken down by lane for all of their customers leveraging the project44 platform, providing both carriers and their customers the data and tools needed to proactively manage exceptions and achieve best-in-class performance levels.
Carrier access to the VOC is a benefit of joining the project44 network, providing carriers additional value for providing visibility data. This single source of truth will allow carriers to improve collaboration with project44 customers and provide them with valuable insight across their loads with project44 customers.
Extended Pre- and Post-Shipment Automation
While many supply chains have put shipment process digitalization and automation on the back burner, it has become a central criterion to increasing efficiency and accuracy.
Additionally, digitizing documents and automating processes is becoming necessary to reduce contact. With an increasing need for social distancing and new safety practices for drivers and dock workers, there is a heightened focus on digitizing traditionally physical shipment paperwork and processes.
project44 has been the leader in less than truckload (LTL) lifecycle automation since 2015 with an initial product that digitized the rating, dispatch and document retrieval processes. The pre- and post-shipment solution is expanding to cover truckload tender, dispatch, and digital documents in North America and Europe.
Customers across regions can now automate the over the road shipment lifecycle, including document retrieval processes including electronic bill of lading (eBOL), proof of delivery (POD), weight and inspection certificate (W&I), and invoices.
Additionally, enhancements to the DriveView™ mobile app allow drivers to capture proof of deliveries for loads that are delivered and tracked using the app, digitizing and streamlining the flow of important transport documents.
Automating over the road shipment execution increases the quality of in-transit tracking, provides real-time access to tracking analytics, reduces costs and improves the safety of frontline workers at critical handoff points.
Streamlined Integration
Part of the reason why it is challenging to build a scalable visibility solution is because of the cost and time required to integrate with carriers and partners. Integration backlogs can extend for months, and that timeline continues to grow as transportation visibility moves to the top of the supply chain priority list.
project44’s new codeless connectors build high-fidelity, API-based connections 85% faster, including integrations with carrier and shipper systems — such as a proprietary TMS — as well as out-of-the-box enterprise systems. These codeless connectors will streamline the integration process, enabling increased network coverage, reduced implementation time, and accelerated ROI.
Explore the Latest Enhancements to Unlock Value
project44’s Fall release delivers enhanced collaboration, automation, and predictive insights, enabling supply chains to unlock unprecedented levels of performance, productivity, and customer experience.
Reach out to our team or watch a release overview video to learn more about the latest enhancements and sign up for our October 29 webinar for a deeper dive into Order and Inventory Visibility.
