Your Guide to Integrating Supply Chain Visibility Data

In recent years, third-party visibility software has exploded in terms of innovation, availability, and usage. In fact, some of the biggest investments in supply chain technology over the last decade have been in the "Freight Visibility" category. Companies like FourKites, Overhaul, project44, Terminal49, and Vizion API have raised over a billion dollars from venture capitalists.

For freight forwarders, this supply chain visibility data hasn’t always been easily digestible or operational. Even forwarders who have enthusiastically adopted third-party visibility data still need to spend hours searching for order details and shipment milestones and entering them manually across their systems, slowing real-time updates on the location of cargo and frustrating customers.

Integrate Supply Chain Visibility Data into Your TMS

The first step in making visibility data useful for a freight forwarder is to integrate it into a Transportation Management System (TMS). Because visibility data is so instrumental to many aspects of your business, it's essential to have it easily accessible for your team to have the most up to date information about all of your customers’ shipments.

Once this essential integration is complete, you can leverage the data in three important ways: operationally, analytically, and for the benefit of your customers.

Using Supply Chain Visibility Data

Operational

By integrating visibility data into your TMS or other native platforms, your team gets specific details about the status of your customers’ shipments, available immediately. These third-party visibility data feeds help your team operate with improved accuracy and efficiency, as the information they need is much more readily accessible and reliable than if it was manually entered or tracked through dozens of emails and phone calls.

Analytical

As a freight forwarder, your role is not just about arranging shipments—it's about optimizing your business so you can ship out more cargo for more shippers, and build better relationships with your existing customers. To get an accurate picture of your freight operations, you can use visibility data to take a look at the last week, last month, or even the last year of your forwarding business and take note of significant trends - good or bad.

Customer Facing

Building a loyal customer base and fostering true partnerships takes time. Sharing helpful insights and real-time updates with your customers will help you earn their trust faster. Not only is visibility data helpful for building customer relationships, but you can integrate your visibility data directly into customer systems to even become a sticker partner in their supply chain. Integrating data from supply chain visibility software and giving customers visibility into your operations will make them much more likely to become a customer for life.

Chain.io Integrates Your Data

Visibility data arrives to you through endless channels and formats. Chain.io translates this data and routes it to any file type in any location for freight execution, customer visibility, reporting, and analysis. Using our pre-built supply chain integration adaptors, we can integrate your TMS to any visibility service provider within weeks so your team can focus on what matters - serving your customers.

Chain.io has pre-built connections to the leading supply chain visibility providers, including Overhaul, project44, Terminal49, Vizion API, and more. Existing connections means Chain.io can get visibility data from a RTTVP into a forwarder’s Transportation Management System

(TMS) or native platform in as little as 2-3 weeks.

Want to learn more about making the most of your visibility data? Download our eBook: “How Freight Forwarders Can Use Supply Chain Visibility Data to Compete and Win.”