Transport visibility makes the difference in the supply chain

Whether it is due to the Corona measures or Brexit: in the past year, carriers have had to deal with significant delays at the European internal borders. This not only has consequences for carriers and their direct clients, but for the entire supply chain in which they operate. The companies that have control over their trucks' arrival times come out on top.

In mid-February 2021, all of a sudden there were dozens of kilometers of traffic jams at the borders in Central Europe. The reason was the German government's decision to only allow drivers from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Tyrol if they could show a negative Corona test. In response, the Austrian government decided to stop drivers without a negative test result at the Italian border. As a result, hundreds of drivers were stranded for hours and their planners were at a loss. How on earth were they supposed to get the shipments to their destination on time?

Vulnerable to disruptions

Unfortunately, this incident is not unusual anymore. Everyone still remembers the tens of kilometers of traffic jams in March 2020, in some places as much as 60 kilometres or more. At that point a lot of European countries closed their borders in the hope of stopping the spread of the Coronavirus as well. At the beginning of this year, Brexit led to delays at the borders of the United Kingdom. The waiting times at the ferries, in the United Kingdom in particular, could be considerably longer.

This not only leads to delays in transport, but to disruptions throughout the entire supply chain. Think of companies in the industry that have to stop production due to a lack of raw materials or parts. To save costs, these companies have eliminated more and more buffer stocks from the supply chain and made just-in-time deliveries the norm. This has made supply chains leaner and more agile, but also more vulnerable to disruptions.

Visibility is more important than ever

In the past year this vulnerability has been brought to light, first with the Coronavirus and then Brexit. What broke a lot of companies, is their limited view of the supply chain. A lot of disruptions already announce themselves at an early stage, but it takes too long for these signals to reach the planners and decision makers in the supply chain. As a result, disruptions go unnoticed for too long, so there is no time to intervene proactively. And by the time the planners and decision-makers are aware of the disruptions, the information they received is already outdated.

A short survey from March 2020 by Supply Chain Movement speaks volumes. No less than half of the 142 surveyed production companies had problems with transport to customers. So it is no wonder that 40 percent of the production companies indicated, three months later in a survey of the same professional medium, that they wanted to invest in visibility software. The need for transport visibility is greater than ever. But what exactly is that, transport visibility?

Sharing real-time data

Transport visibility is primarily about sharing data about the status of shipments. Where is the truck with the shipment? Is it running on schedule or is he in danger of being late? Telematics systems provide real-time insight into the geographic position of trucks. Based on this, the estimated time of arrival can be continuously calculated, taking the historical and current traffic information and possibly also the weather forecast into account.

Digitisation gives you the opportunity to share this data in real-time with all relevant parties in the supply chain. So not only the planner of the transport company, but also the logistics service provider who has chartered him, the shipper for whom this service provider drives and the shipper's customer for whom the shipment is intended. The next step is to translate that data into meaningful information. The shipper's customer probably only wants to be notified if the estimated time of arrival differs from the planned arrival time.

Waiting times prognosis

In the past year, we have seen that in case of an emergency, we need more information than just the geographical position of our own trucks. After all, telematics systems don't tell you how long the truck will have to wait for the border or the ferry. The planner can only provide that information afterwards, but by then it is already outdated. What the waiting time was yesterday doesn't tell you anything about today's waiting times.

Digitisation in combination with artificial intelligence can be the solution to this too. This makes it possible to use the (anonymised) data of all trucks to calculate waiting times. Not only the data of our own trucks, but also that of thousands of other trucks. Not only yesterday's waiting times, but also today's. Based on the data of trucks that have just gone through the waiting lines.

Corona and Brexit dashboard (truck border and sea crossing times) from Sixfold

The interactive map from Sixfold, Europe’s leading real-time visibility provider and the real-time visibility arm of Transporeon, is based on this idea. Shortly after large parts of Europe were closed in March 2020, this dashboard was developed based on the data of tens of thousands of trucks that are connected to the Sixfold visibility platform. This free, publicly accessible dashboard provided reliable information about the delays at the various border crossings and their developments in real-time. Companies from all over Europe used this map to predict arrival times and more efficiently manage their transports during significant disruption.

The same happened at the beginning of this year with Sixfold's Brexit dashboard, which focuses on freight traffic to and from the United Kingdom. With Brexit triggering huge traffic delays, businesses needed transparency into what was happening across their supply chains. Trimble has also incorporated Sixfold's information into a Trimble Maps layer, which is used daily by planners from hundreds of transportation companies.

Make a difference

By having complementary visibility information in an additional layer, dispatchers have all the information they need to keep delays to a minimum. They can see at a glance potential impacts on execution and decide to change plans. They have all the information to provide partners in the chain with supportive information on arrival times. Anyone capable of this can make a difference in the supply chain.