Stay Ahead of Disruptions: Leveraging Real-Time Visibility in Your TMS


Real-time visibility (RTV) has become a table-stakes capability for supply chains as leaders face increased pressure to meet customer expectations and build more resilient and agile operations.

Overview

Best-in-class transportation management systems (TMS) provide real-time visibility to your global shipments and inventory, all within a unified platform. By connecting all your data, suppliers, carriers, and operations into one TMS, you gain the control and agility needed to make informed decisions before disruptions impact your supply chain.

When evaluating a TMS, it’s crucial to understand its real-time visibility features and benefits to ensure your supply chain is ready to stay ahead of disruptions, save money, and improve service levels.

You will learn:



Key benefits of real time visibility

  • Increased savings from reducing detention and penalties (OTIF)
  • Improve utilization of warehouse and yard resources from real-time ETAs
  • Empower customers to view their shipment status vs. relying on customer service
  • Reduce safety stock with more reliable delivery performance
  • Mitigate and avoid disruptions with integration of external data feeds
  • Increase customer service with proactive updates on shipment status
  • Turn data into business intelligence to reveal actionable insights and power AI agents to automate tasks and workflows

The importance of real-time visibility in your TMS

Supply chains today are being tasked with becoming more connected, complex, and multi-channel while reducing resources, spend, and even carbon footprint. If that’s not enough of a challenge, supply chain leaders must deal with external disruptions that necessitate flexibility and agility, such as global conflicts, labor strikes, trade disputes, and weather events.

With nearly 30% of shippers saying the most significant threat to their supply chains are geopolitical, economic and physical disruptions, according to our 2024 customer research study, shippers more than ever need the enhanced level of agility, speed and control over their supply chains.

To navigate these challenges, it’s critical to make your supply chain visible and accessible, utilizing technology that can adapt as your supply chain evolves. Having visibility to all your movements, past and present, allows you to prioritize initiatives to improve things for the future.

Navisphere®, our global TMS, gives visibility to all inventory, at rest at your facilities or at supplier facilities, and in motion throughout LSP (logistics service provider) networks, all within one tech platform. To do this, we utilize an industry leading suite of APIs that connect to your ERP (enterprise resource planning) and your network of LSPs. Navisphere applies machine learning and artificial intelligence to predict ETA (estimated time of arrival) and calculate risk or disruption within your supply chain.


Top supply chain challenges driving the need for real-time visibility

The following are some top supply chain challenges fueling the importance of having real-time visibility capabilities within your TMS:

1. Harness value from the exponential growth in data

There is more data today than ever before. In addition to the exponential growth of data, almost every segment and node in your supply chain is now producing accessible data. But are you:

  • Capturing information in an efficient and effective way?
  • Able to access data within one centralized platform?
  • Utilizing this data to build predictive models about inventory flowing through your supply chain and automate manual tasks by enabling Gen-AI technology?

As the most connected logistics platform, Navisphere delivers the following advantages by managing and extracting value from your data.

Business Intelligence: Our TMS turns unorganized and disparate streams of data into powerful business intelligence to identify opportunities within the supply chain. It can also be incorporated into other data lakes within your business to impact areas outside logistics, like innovation, value creation, pricing, and more.

These insights can be utilized for network design and engineering projects, driving continuous improvements and cost savings across your network. With C.H. Robinson Managed Solutions™, shippers gain access to TMS technology, managed transportation, and 4PL services under one seamless offering. This includes connecting with top-tier engineering talent for transportation modeling, performance optimization, and risk assessment services.

Predictive Analytics: Navisphere ensures that not only does more information lead to improvements in cost, time, and reliability, but that data can increasingly help predict problems before they arise. For example, you can use Navisphere’s dynamic ETA calculator to:

  • Identify when product will be at your facilities to plan receiving labor
  • Compare the ETA to the commitment date to predict risk to the inventory in motion
  • Compare in-transit inventory to your current stock to calculate days of inventory on hand for critical items

Touchless Automation: With our data advantage and Gen-AI enhanced capabilities, Navisphere automates your manual, time-consuming tasks, allowing you to move faster and keep your team focused on high-value, strategic initiatives. Gen AI supports automation across the entire lifecycle of a shipment including:

  • Quotes and load tenders
  • Appointment scheduling
  • In-transit visibility and status checks
  • Document retrieval and delivery
  • Change requests made outside of systemic connections

2. Meet increased customer expectations

In today’s world, consumers expect to know how their order is progressing through every stage of the journey, from purchase to delivery. Speed, flexibility, and consistency are not simply expectations, but demands from consumers and customers of all sizes. Even internal departments within your company have similar expectations of the supply chain and logistics teams. Navisphere addresses these challenges in the following ways.

Proactive alerts: Be the first to know about shipment status updates, delay notifications, or disruptions, so you can improve service and communication with your customers. Navisphere allows you to configure real-time status alerts based on product, line of business, channel, value, and many other filters that our customers can enable.

Customer engagement: Connecting your customers to your TMS allows you to deliver on the expectations discussed above. An example of meeting this challenge is how we deliver real-time status updates to Microsoft, a key customer and partner of Navisphere.

When an order is placed on Microsoft’s online store, a tracking application built within their storefront that commits to a promised delivery date, provides regular and timely updates, and sends email notifications if there is a delay or issue, often with a discount or free item. This keeps the consumer in the Microsoft online store instead of sending them to a carrier website, giving them a unified experience.

All of that is done by listening to the REST API (Application Programming Interface) milestone service built into Navisphere and leveraging its underlying intelligence and connectivity. Larger customers, who have many facilities and repeat orders, can also be granted access to the platform so they can self-serve on their transactions, reducing call and email volume significantly. Additionally, it streamlines their customer service department to address more strategic initiatives.

Reduce Risk: Supply chain disruptions can happen at any time, and each one has its own unique impact and characteristics. Knowing the current location of your inventory and where it's going in the coming days is crucial for supply chain leaders to develop effective and timely mitigation strategies. Navisphere integrates with a robust set of APIs that link your supply chain data with external factors like weather and traffic, pairing that with predictive analytics, AI, and machine learning to help you proactively track and avoid potential disruptions.

3. Navigating supply chain complexity with agility

The pace of change in the supply chain industry today is unprecedented, and global commerce is more complex than ever before. RTV and the ability to consume, combine, and analyze data from a growing number of integrations is essential to building a responsive, resilient, competitive, and profitable strategy. Customers need RTV capabilities to be global, multimodal, multi-channel, and extremely agile as their business grows and changes.

Cloud Capabilities: Navisphere is deployed to the cloud to deliver an even more comprehensive, powerful solution:

  • Unlimited scalability
  • Premier data security
  • Local deployments within your region
  • Access to massive ecosystem of tech partners
  • Increased application speed

Internet of Things (IoT) Device Connectivity: TNavisphere offers IoT integrations to take monitoring and tracking to the next level. Leveraging IoT devices, we can measure and monitor physical elements that impact your shipments:

Navisphere on laptop screen

With this feature, you see the real-time location of your products, as well as monitor and be alerted to potential spoilage, damages, or tampering of their goods, with the goal of engaging and recovering from the issue immediately.

By leveraging real-time visibility and insights within your TMS, you can build a resilient, agile, and responsive supply chain capable of meeting the ever-evolving demands of the market.

See how our decades of expertise and industry-leading global TMS technology keep our customers a step ahead. Connect with us to help you prepare for what’s next with more data on shipments, routing, and carriers than any other provider—to accelerate your supply chain.