Shipment Visibility 101

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ERIC KLEIN: Where is my stuff? Or more typically for a business, where are those T-shirts my customers are waiting to buy? Knowing the location and status of freight is highly dependent upon who is asking the question.

So to start with, it is important to understand, what is the customer really looking for? Is it a purchase order? Is it an ocean container? Or is it the product they are waiting for at their store?

In every instance, without the whole picture, there is a missing piece of the puzzle. So all of these assets need to be mixed together to provide a basic status of location. So let's talk about location for a minute.

While it may seem easy to say location is where something is at, where is "where"? Are we talking about latitude and longitude? Or are you talking about a named geographic location, like the Port of Los Angeles?

Events is another key concept. These are the things that happen to a shipment along the journey, like inspected or made available.

The last key concept is about state. In this concept, I'm talking about a particular condition of the object we care about at a specific time. Examples of states for your shipment are moving, en route, empty, full.

So in summary, track-trace technology provides visibility into a shipment's physical position in a supply chain. Visibility is the combination of location and state of a shipment with the added context of the events, both past and projected.

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ERIC KLEIN: We want to get our data from the root source itself. This can mean the ocean carrier system or a marine terminal or from tracking hardware directly attached to the shipment or a particular asset.

But if we want to track ships from any location on Earth, we need to utilize a constellation of low-Earth orbiting satellites. And in this case, we want to source that data from the satellite companies themselves that are picking up this vessel or AIS tracking data. This is the same model used for hardware that is used to track trucks and trains and in some cases, directly affixing devices on cargo pallets or on the packages themselves.

We also source data directly from the terminals and carriers that move the cargo. These providers are the gatekeepers for the handling of the cargo itself, whether they are reporting on the bookings and documentation needs or the key events and handling as the container is offloaded from a ship or gated into the facility itself.

The last step is to normalize the data so that it is consistent across all sources. Why is this needed? Using a simple example, the name of a ship can have a surprising variety of instances, as the logistics world is full of all kinds of short names and acronyms.

So to recap, we get visibility from a variety of sources but target the root sources as the best option. No single source provides all of the data. So our service needs to fill in the gaps and, in turn, sort out right from wrong in the cases of overlaps. Lastly, the service normalizes the data into a consistent and uniform model for presentation and distribution.

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ERIC KLEIN: So where does this data show up? And how is it used today?

In the simplest context, this shows up in Flexport platforms.

Each application determines how best to present the data, as it is very contextual as to who is the intended user. And this is the most important part about visibility.

Knowing where things are is not the real goal. It is about supporting a user's need to make informed decisions. For example, if a shipment is projected to be late, a user will be looking to make decisions about the implications of the shipment being late or whether there are options to adjust plans to bring the schedule back into compliance.