Tag: IT|software|visibility

Supply chain visibility company FourKites has formed a partnership with Sony Network Communications Europe. The partnership will integrate data from Visilion — Sony’s real-time cargo and asset tracking solution — with FourKites’ real-time, end-to-end supply chain visibility platform. This collaboration will help enterprise customers solve their most complex use cases. Now, customers will be able to view FourKites’ real-time data for shipments in transit and in the yard, together with Visilion’s granular real-time data on cargo location and condition to provide best-in-class estimated times of arrival (ETAs) and enhanced end-customer experiences.

Faced with ongoing global supply chain disruptions — including port congestion, port and rail strikes, global conflicts and more — businesses need more meaningful insights to mitigate preventable delays and damage, and to keep goods moving to their final destinations. Real-time visibility and actionable analytics regarding the location, temperature and status of shipments is critical, particularly for those in the Consumer Packaged Goods, Food & Beverage and Pharmaceutical industries, who ship products that require specific in-transit conditions to maintain quality.

“Businesses today require more high-quality, real-time supply chain data,” said Nimesh Patel, vice president of global alliances and partnerships at FourKites. “The Visilion solution from Sony provides an extra layer of granular data about the contents of containers and status of sensitive and/or temperature-controlled shipments. Our partnership will ensure that this data becomes more accessible than ever to businesses around the world.”

Visilion, Sony’s real-time cargo and asset tracking solution, offers industry-leading shock, tilt and temperature detection capabilities, among others, to ensure that goods are handled properly and maintained at the right temperature and humidity during transit, thereby mitigating losses. This functionality, combined with FourKites’ market-leading Dynamic ETA across all modes, provides shippers with complete visibility into potential disruptions and product loss for goods in transit. In addition, FourKites’ international tracking capabilities, together with Visilion sensor data, provide an added dimension of granular visibility into ocean containers that often move through complicated, multi-stop journeys.

“FourKites’ shared commitment to industry-leading innovation, product quality and industry collaboration made them the obvious partner for us,” said Erik Lund, Head of Tracking Division, Sony Network Communications Europe. “We look forward to working together to provide our mutual customers with integrated supply chain data to fuel better decision-making and, ultimately, more efficient supply chain operations — in Europe and around the world.”

Over the last year, FourKites has experienced record growth in the European, Middle Eastern and African (EMEA) markets, achieving 97% growth in shipments YoY as of October 2022. The number of customers tracking loads with FourKites in EMEA grew 40% in the same time period, while the number of carriers tracking shipments grew by 50% in the same period.

 

 

Rapidly expanding furniture company Oliver Space, which offers a fully circular home furnishing experience, is enjoying complete inventory visibility for the first time since implementing Synergy’s SnapFulfil WMS suite.

The San Francisco-based business – which not only delivers and assembles its premium quality furniture for customers, but also picks up and refurbishes used Oliver items to be made available at discounted prices – had struggled with inventory, picking and staging accuracy as the refurbishment returns side of the business ramped up.

However, the flexible and highly configurable SnapFulfil WMS has given Oliver Space the multiple tiers of stock and storage categories they require for precise inventory reconciliation. For customers, this means an even better experience as fulfilment is seamless, faster and more accurate.

David Guckian, Product Manager at Oliver Space, says: “We can now separate out, both in the system and the warehouse itself, all the different levels of stock and returns, which immediately optimised our inventory management capacity. We’d outgrown our initial 18,000 sq ft warehouse, but on moving to the new 30,000 sq ft DC realised a more consistent and reliable set of processes was required – and SnapFulfil ticks all the boxes.

“We looked at the full range of WMS solutions available, but around our key requirement of customisation, the so-called top tier systems were too labour intensive and costly to justify implementing. We treated it as a proof of concept and SnapFulfil quickly became the provider of choice because of their ability to work with us and facilitate all the process quirks and anomalies we required for a niche and complex business operation.”

The Oliver Space implementation was handled remotely, which is just as effective as on-site delivery as Synergy is a domain leader in digital onboarding. This saves customers time, money and resources, as well as aligning with their sustainability credentials.

Oliver Space was up and running in just under two months – even allowing for its more cautious approach to go live and use the test system to run live operations concurrently with its existing ERP until it had completed all necessary development internally.

Guckian explains: “The SnapFulfil team is highly responsive and together we worked through the various challenges that our operations model brings quickly and efficiently. They helped our engineering team implement API and other software so they would integrate fully, plus all the go-live training, UAT and testing was done in the staging environment – so that we were able to fine tune and dovetail everything in advance without interrupting our day-to-day operations.

“Consequently, when we were ready to go live it all went to plan and was like flicking a switch because of all the joint preparatory work we’d put in.”

Oliver Space is building the circular economy of furniture for a more sustainable future. With refurbished pieces becoming increasingly popular among an environmentally and fiscally conscious consumer base, SnapFulfil’s renowned reverse logistics capabilities are more necessary than ever. It also has the ability to scale up on user licence costs effectively during busier periods.

Guckian says: “As an exclusively online business we’re tech-centric, so Synergy and SnapFulfil are a natural fit and they understand where we’re coming from. Demand continues to grow, so we’re considering a second DC in Los Angeles early 2023, again powered by SnapFulfil, but I think we could be using their self implementation program that allows customers to onboard the system themselves.

“All we’ll need is their detailed rules engine training and we’re good to go. That’s how configurable their software is, and it will give us the control, independence and system expertise to manage our own roll out.”

 

FourKites, a leading real-time supply chain visibility platform, has introduced its Order Intelligence Hub, a new single-pane-of-glass view of the entire lifecycle of every order. By integrating order data, load information across modes, yard shipments, inventory visibility and other critical third-party systems, such as warehouse management systems and order management systems, shippers and their supply chain partners now have a powerful new tool to eliminate inefficiencies, manage exceptions, reduce expenses and increase customer satisfaction at every step of an order’s journey.

With the goal of breaking down silos across systems, this solution was developed in close collaboration with major consumer packaged goods (CPG) customers and driven by insights from some of the largest companies in the Consumer Brand Association, which champions more than 1,700 leading CPG brands.

As part of the recently announced Supply Chain Health and Performance Task Force, the mission of which is to increase visibility and ease supply chain pressures across the CPG industry, FourKites worked closely with Consumer Brands and 15 of its members to identify common pain points and create a solution that would address those challenges by breaking down silos between teams and systems, and leveraging the scale of the FourKites network to provide unprecedented visibility into the CPG supply chain ecosystem.

Through shared dashboards, participating members can take advantage of a real-time view of facilities, lanes and interchanges causing the most inefficiencies for CPG companies. With Order Intelligence Hub, users can drill down into the line-item level impacts of bottlenecks, and can then collaborate across teams to resolve those inefficiencies.

“Collaboration is essential for building modern, resilient supply chains,” said Tom Madrecki, vice president of supply chain and logistics at Consumer Brands. “The Supply Chain Health and Performance Task Force — in partnership with FourKites — is bringing more visibility, agility and data sharing to our supply chain, allowing the CPG industry to better navigate future challenges and ensure the reliable delivery of essential goods.”

By eliminating silos and integrating disparate systems, FourKites’ Order Intelligence Hub enables collaboration and insight throughout the lifecycle of every order. Teams can much more effectively manage exceptions by identifying issues and their root causes in real time, anywhere. Customisable, persona-based dashboards provide every stakeholder group — from supply planning through to customer service and facilities management — with the data and metrics that matter most to them.

The entire community benefits from FourKites‘ market-leading network data set, collected via working with more of the world’s leading brands than any other visibility provider, including 18 of the top-20 F&B brands and nine of the top-10 CPG companies.

“The Order Intelligence Hub is a big milestone as we execute on our vision to connect the physical and digital worlds of warehouses, stores and transportation with real-time data and machine learning,” said Mathew Elenjickal, founder and CEO of FourKites. “Collaborating with our customers and other industry leaders, like Consumer Brands, in product development has enabled us to bring to market some of the most innovative solutions that address the industry’s most critical pain points.”

With the Order Intelligence Hub, FourKites builds on its long history of industry-first innovations, including multimodal purchase order tracking, which provides line-item level shipment detail using PO numbers, and Dynamic Yard, which gives enterprises the ability to proactively manage all of their facilities based on real-time, in-yard freight data and analytics.

FourKites and its largest customers, which ship some of the world’s leading brands to locations around the world, have integrated previously siloed systems across customer service, transportation planning, supply/demand planning and warehouse management to enable internal stakeholder communication and insights throughout the lifecycle of every order.