FourKites, the leader in predictive supply chain visibility, today announced the industry's first product that provides companies with real-time visibility across their network, including freight that they do not manage. With FourKites' new Network VisibilitySM product, shippers can see real-time location updates on their vendor-managed inbound and customer-pickup outbound freight, in addition to the managed freight they already track with FourKites. This gives companies full visibility across their supply chains, enabling them to enhance warehouse operations, reduce yard congestion, and improve carrier and driver productivity.
Vendor-managed shipments can comprise up to 70 percent of a large company's inbound freight. Without real-time visibility, top-line savings can disappear without warning, and create unmanageable exposure to operational inefficiencies and labor and detention costs—all while straining even the strongest supplier relationships.
Before today, transportation leaders were limited to sweeping, reactive decisions to manage these challenges. Even with the latest transportation management systems, unmanaged freight remained a black box of uncertainty, and an enterprise-wide visibility solution remained out of reach. FourKites' new Network Visibility solution leverages the company's vast network of shippers and carriers to allow for comprehensive visibility across the entire supply chain, including freight managed by external vendors. The solution normalizes payer and facility records across supply chains, masks sensitive information; automatically detects and draws potential connections with suppliers and receivers, and makes it easy to share freight visibility in a controlled environment between select suppliers and receivers through a single discovery dashboard.
Since launching in 2014, FourKites has pioneered the industry shift to real-time predictive visibility, enabling shippers to improve on-time delivery and optimize supply chains based on actionable data and prescriptive recommendations. FourKites has built the industry's most robust network, with more than 260 of the world's top shippers, including 18 of the top-20 food and beverage companies and four of the top-five CPG companies. FourKites currently tracks more than 500,000 shipments every day.
