Global transportation is the nexus through which all related international transportation information flows. Capturing, aggregating, and analyzing all the global supply chain transportation and product/SKU level detail is foundational to having end-to-end supply chain visibility. And end-to-end supply chain visibility is a necessity in optimizing demand fulfillment.Optimized demand fulfillment is defined by the success in getting the right product, to the right destination at the right time with minimized safety inventory. In order to accomplish optimized demand fulfillment, it requires understanding where a product/SKU is within the end-to-end supply chain. This highlights the need for having visibility of a product/SKU throughout the global transportation life-cycle.

High transportation visibility is essential.

Global transportation teams are uniquely positioned to optimize supply-side product/SKU availability with demand-side requirements. Because it is the role of the global transportation team to manage the movement of a product/SKU from the origin to the destination it is essential that they have:

• visibility of purchase and sales order information so that they can plan and execute shipments to meet demand requirements across the global supply chain,
• visibility of the booking and ASN detail to ensure that product is prepared for shipment to meet the planned receipt dates,
• visibility to the actual shipment status messages to ensure that transportation units are shipped and executed as scheduled,
• visibility to product/SKU detail in a shipment/transportation unit throughout its global transportation lifecycle to support communications and collaboration with internal users and external 3rd parties.
• visibility to the port of entry to determine the status of a transportation unit for delivery priority,
• visibility to regulatory statuses at the port of entry,
• visibility to receipt detail,
• visibility to exception alerts when defined milestone events are not met,
• visibility to freight contract cost elements for freight audit validation
• visibility to performance metrics

With this level of visibility, transportation teams can actually manage and control the global transportation environment. Visibility empowers the transportation team to be proactive with their 3rd party suppliers and their vendors to ensure improvement in optimizing their supply/demand chains.

Having a global TMS is the key to visibility.

Global visibility is expressed through the translation of data from across multiple suppliers and 3rd party providers within a global supply chain into meaningful and accessible information. In order to achieve real global visibility, the transportation data must be aggregated and presented in a meaningful and contextual way for the users.To achieve visibility today, most companies depend on spreadsheets and 3PLs to provide information on the position of transportation units during transit. At best, these are basic solutions that do not provide the breadth and depth of information necessary to support real-time on-demand visibility. Lack of quality information in real-time results in limited reporting, superficial analytics.

What should a global TMS provide?

A well designed global TMS provides a powerful platform to aggregate data from all participants across the supply chain and contextualize it for specific users for their unique requirements. Global TMS replaces the need for spreadsheets and dependence on 3rd party systems for highly granular information which in turn is converted into high-resolution visibility.A well designed global TMS provides deep functional capability supporting transportation operations to manage and control transportation-related activities and ensure global supply chain visibility across the supply chain from suppliers to final destination.Global TMS is foundational to enabling transportation teams to deliver more value through streamlined operations, total visibility, increased data control, improved reporting and powerful analytics.Global transportation visibility is essential to ensuring supply chain optimization. 3rdwave iTMS is a tightly integrated transportation platform designed to deliver complete end-to-end visibility of your global supply chain from all perspectives of the organization.