Supply chain visibility software gathers the records of trucks, ports, ships and warehouses into one view of where every shipment is, and predicts when each one will arrive. It is also called a real-time transportation visibility platform. Its users are shippers, the companies that own the goods, and the logistics companies that move them.
Without it, a shipper that uses 30 transport companies must ask each of them where its goods are. Each one answers in a different way: on a phone call, by email or on its own tracking website. Visibility software collects this data automatically. It reads truck locations from GPS devices, a kind of telematics. In India, many trucks belong to owners with one or two trucks and carry no GPS device. So the software often locates the driver's mobile phone through the telecom network, after the driver agrees by SMS. It reads ship positions from the signals that every large ship must send. It reads container events, such as "unloaded" and "released by customs", from port terminal operating systems and from shipping lines. And it reads bookings from freight forwarding software and trips from the shipper's transportation management system (TMS).
Then it predicts the arrival time. A simple estimate divides the distance left by the average speed. The software does better. It learns from millions of past trips how long each road takes at each hour, how long each port usually holds a container, and how often each carrier is late. This is a kind of forecasting, like demand forecasting, but it forecasts a time instead of a quantity.
Imagine a television maker near Chennai that imports display panels from China. A container is due at Chennai port on Monday, and at the factory on Tuesday. On Saturday, the software sees that the ship is waiting at anchor outside the port, because the port is busy. From past delays at that port, it moves the predicted arrival at the factory from Tuesday to Thursday. The factory's planners see the change two days early. They move a different television model, whose panels are already in stock, forward in the production schedule. Without the warning, the panel line would have stood idle on Tuesday and Wednesday.
The platform passes its arrival times on. A distribution centre's yard management system uses them to plan which dock door each truck will use. An online shop's order tracking software uses them to tell a customer when a parcel will arrive. Temperature readings from cold-chain monitoring can be shown on the same shipment. And the screen on which a large shipper watches all its shipments at once is called a supply chain control tower.