Maximize Your ROI With Supply Chain Visibility, and Here’s How?

ByAtul Jain

One of the core benefits customers seek from a logistics platform is real-time visibility into their cargo’s movement. While this has always been crucial, the concept of supply chain visibility has expanded significantly.

In 2024, as business leaders focus on building robust supply chains, real-time visibility has evolved beyond basic shipment tracking. It’s now a strategic tool for maximizing return on investment and enhancing supply chain adaptability.

The shift: Customer-centric supply chain

Today’s customers are better informed and equipped with advanced technology than ever before! They expect flawless experience in all aspects of the business. Since customer delight has become a major competitive differentiator, organisations strive for faster and better delivery experiences for their customers. This has made supply chain and logistics more customer-centric in recent years. Businesses have realised that the best way to achieve this is by embracing enhanced transparency and visibility technologies in the supply chain.

Now comes the next question. How can you maximise your ROI with supply chain visibility?

Here’s how!

Customer Satisfaction: The Key to Growth

The changing customer mindset and high expectations have led to a competitive supply chain space where businesses aim to deliver the cargo without any delays or mistakes. In addition, customers are now asking for granular visibility on all their shipments. Customers demand timely delivery and accurate real-time information along every step of the shipment until delivery.

In such a scenario, the lack of real-time visibility technology will lead to a higher customer churn rate. For this reason, more and more companies are investing in multi-modal real-time visibility solutions.

Opportunities for ROI maximisation:

  • Eliminate the hundreds of hours of phone calls and countless email threads to track and trace your shipments. Your logistics team can focus on more critical tasks than putting out fires, thus saving time and money.
  • More responsive and accurate customer service
  • Improved relationships with customers, driving more business
When a leading online automobile shipping broker specialising in transporting vehicles across countries was poorly affected because of delays in shipments due to inefficient and inaccurate manual shipment tracking, the company automated the process using GoComet’s GoTrack. By automating their entire shipment tracking process, the company eliminated human dependency by 100%, and the customer queries about shipments’ status were reduced by 90%. 

Accurate KPIs for Your Carriers’ Performance

As the saying goes, you can’t manage what you can’t measure. Real-time visibility is a great tool to measure the performance of all your carriers in the long run. This data can be used to compare, assess and benchmark to identify the best performing and cost-effective carriers for your business.

It is essential to set benchmarks for carriers to assess and prepare for immediate and future requirements. If few of your carriers are consistently causing you revenue loss, you can identify these carriers by leveraging data. Without data, this option could remain elusive, and hence the need for supply chain visibility has become imperative. 

Opportunities for ROI maximisation:

  • Collect, consolidate and assess carrier performance data insights in real-time to make cost-effective business decisions

Improve OTIF Compliance

The US food retail industry loses an estimated $15-20 billion in sales every year because items are out of stock or otherwise unsaleable. This can be directly attributed to poor supply chain performance. For this reason, not just food retailers but the retail industry in general have started using OTIF (On-Time and In-Full delivery) metrics to evaluate their suppliers. Retailers impose fines and other late fees (3-5% of the cost of goods) to suppliers that don’t deliver their orders on-time and in-full. 

Real-time visibility is crucial for managing OTIF performance. These technology offerings allow for real-time updates, planning sufficient shipment lead times, assessing the best carriers based on performance metrics and proactively preventing late delivery. 

Opportunities for ROI maximisation:

  • Improve your OTIF scores and get incentivised for timely delivery
  • Save costs on unwanted fines and late fees
  • Uncover new business opportunities through improved customer satisfaction

Minimise Demurrage and Detention Costs

Detention fees constitute a significant expense for many shippers worldwide. But this is a problem that can be effectively addressed by better visibility and actionable insights, both obtainable from a real-time visibility platform. Through these actionable insights and multi-stakeholder collaboration on a single platform, organisations can quickly identify and proactively address possible hurdles. This will significantly decrease detention and demurrage charges and improve cash cycles. 

Opportunities for ROI maximisation:

Uncover Supply Chain Agility

Supply chain leaders are investing in real-time visibility technologies to turn the vast amount of data obtained at every supply chain link into valuable insights. If the pandemic and other related disruptions taught one thing to supply chain leaders, it is this: the supply chain needs to move from diagnostic to predictive and prescriptive models. Only better visibility coupled with data-driven decision-making can help make supply chain processes more agile and provide organisations with a competitive edge. 

Opportunities for ROI maximisation:

  • Proactive in foreseeing and responding to disruptions and hence any loss to the business is significantly minimised
  • Strong collaboration within and outside the company helps in meeting customer demands accurately
  • Uncover new growth opportunities through data insights
With over 200 international shipments per month, a well-known specialist chemical distributor serving all major markets worldwide was severely affected when the pandemic-driven port congestion hit global trade. The delivery schedules of over 51% of the company’s shipments were affected. When the company deployed GoComet’s GoTrack module, our AI-driven forecasts on port delays helped them proactively address possible bottlenecks and optimise their shipment planning to avoid delays.

While organisations that adopted visibility technologies at an early stage are reaping sizable returns on investment, the majority of other companies are aggressively joining the bandwagon now more than ever. To combat the growing challenges in the supply chain as best as possible, organisations will continue to invest in real-time supply chain visibility solutions in 2022. 

– Chitransh Sahai | CBO, GoComet

Feel free to reach out to us if you’re looking to build your supply chain resilience and maximise your ROI through real-time supply chain visibility. 

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