We live in a hyper-connected world. It seems like there’s a new app developed every week that connects people or systems for a specific purpose—there’s even a social media network specifically for beer drinkers. So why isn’t there a comprehensive platform to connect one of the oldest and most interconnected systems in the world, the supply chain, in a frictionless and streamlined way?
Now, there is…
Introducing project44’s Visibility Operations Center™ (VOC)—project44’s easy-to-use and intuitive application that provides visibility into global, multimodal transportation for all parties across your supply chain. By stitching together global multimodal shipments in a single view, the VOC helps you efficiently manage resources, improve inventory predictability, strengthen supplier-retailer collaboration, and refine lead time.
With this application, project44 is providing the necessary digital infrastructure and business intelligence to reimagine your company, your supply chain, and your working patterns.We are truly connecting shipments, people, and capacity together in a single application to deliver the next-level of Advanced Visibility beyond just “dots on a map”.
The Visibility Operations Center Boosts Predictability and Facilitates Collaboration
True Advanced Visibility is fed by high-fidelity data. Our Visibility Operations Center provides a set of tools for users to interact with our Advanced Visibility Platform, the real-time data within it, and the relevant parties involved with a given shipment. The result is a fully connected and visible supply chain.
Improve Lead Time and Inventory Predictability
In order to provide a truly useful and deeply analytical experience, there are multiple ways to organize and view a wealth of different levels of data. The VOC allows users to drill down to line item visibility. You can see details on the order and individual shipment levels as well. The VOC provides information about individual shipments or multiple shipments at once. It pushes real-time updates about individual events across multiple shipments, segments, modes, and geographies. What does that mean for you?
- Tracking the contents of a shipment provides the ability to tie transportation exceptions with inventory planning—if a SKU is included in an exception notification, it is communicated to stakeholders so they know exactly what is affected and how.
- Dynamic shipment contents allow stakeholders to know what is in a container throughout all the stops in a journey, and predictive and real-time container tracking and transportation risk data, which is tied to order information, helps stakeholders plan more efficiently and react to changes in a timely manner, allowing you to mitigate inventory risks and reduce damage losses.
If you need information about shipments based on location, the VOC’s location-specific dashboards provide health and volume details for Inbound and outbound shipments. Multiple store-level inbound visibility enables delivery planning and staffing to reduce driver dwell times and the fines associated with missing delivery windows. Set up custom geofences to trigger alerts when a shipment enters and leaves a specific area, and use events to kick off workflows in case an exception occurs.
The Ultimate Collaboration Tool Improves Efficiency and Decision Making
Having all of this information in one place allows you to better communicate and collaborate with all stakeholders.
You have the ability to add notes to individual shipments, which can be shared with internal stakeholders by tagging them. You also have the option to share relevant notes with your external partners so you can inform them if plans change or there’s something you want them to be made aware of. It’s a simple and efficient way to securely share shipment info with users both within and outside of your organization. You can even customize aspects of the application so that it feels more consistent with your company’s brand. The result is a major improvement in communication both internally and with external partners, suppliers or customers.
Predictive Analytics and Timely Notifications
project44 retrieves location updates from carriers via APIs, ELD, telematics, or smartphone applications, then enriches the data and applies predictive analytics to deliver accurate arrival, pickup, location, ETA, and delivery information. If line item-level information is available when a shipment is created, we capture that as well. The power of this detailed and sortable information increases business intelligence capabilities.
Sometimes you just need the high-level. The customizable dashboards available in the VOC allow you to manage lanes, events, in-transit shipments, and exceptions by viewing a landing page containing a customizable picture of locations, customers, carriers, and shipment health. The intelligent search function makes it easy to find a shipment or set of shipments based on identifiers such as BOL, order, customer, carrier, or location. You can also gain visibility across multiple regions with a configurable map.
ETAs in the VOC are responsive to real-time conditions so they’re predictive and accurate. Anything that has an effect, like traffic patterns, weather, or road conditions, is dynamically factored into the ETA. Customizable geo-fences are used to enhance ETA calculations and provide more exact arrival events. This gives users an up-to-date picture of when their shipments will arrive at their destination, allowing for better planning and coordination.
If something important happens you want to know about it right away. The VOC features configurable, rules-based email, text, or push notifications to ensure teams are empowered at key milestones. Notifications can be triggered by the following events: Running Late, Excessive Idle Time, Excessive Dwell Time, Pending Arrival to stop, Departure from stop, Tracking Approval Pending, Tracking Approval Denied, Temperature Out of Range, Out for Delivery, Active Holds, (Ocean) & Demurrage Risks, and Available Containers.
The supply chain is in the early stages of a technological revolution that is radically changing the way we work. It’s not enough to understand this innovation. To succeed you have to operationalize it. You have to convert it into enterprise-wide value.Our mission at project44 is to usher in a new era of trust and predictability to transportation and logistics. That happens by getting everyone (and everything) on the same page. That’s what our Visibility Operations Center does for our customers and their partners. Schedule a live demonstration today.