Order and Shipment Visibility
| Order and Shipment Visibility Issues and Challenges | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| To reduce inventories, optimize networks, and mitigate risk, global supply chain teams need near real-time visibility into the status of orders and shipments. However, supply chain visibility is complicated by today's global trading systems, which have different infrastructures, data definitions, and message formats. It can be difficult to receive and interpret status updates from numerous carriers, suppliers, brokers, and freight forwarders to gain a comprehensive picture and assess performance and bottlenecks. Without this big picture, it becomes nearly impossible to implement cost-saving strategies, such as just-in-time inventory replenishment. When delivery windows are tight, even minor missteps and miscalculations can have major consequences. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Challenges include: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▪ | Handling the complex relationships of orders distributed across multiple shipments, equipment, carriers, and modes | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▪ | Connecting and maintaining a supply chain network across widely varying information system capabilities and message types | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▪ | Receiving and interpreting differing message content formats for analysis | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▪ | Focusing on the information that indicates areas of concern, thereby allowing management by exception | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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How Amber Road Can Help The network's secure data communication services enable supply chain partners to share information, distribute reports, and receive alerts on milestones that are critical to the timely delivery of goods. A robust supplier portal enables trade partners to exchange purchase order, shipment, and inventory information and support collaborative logistics processes. The portal facilitates efficient communication and decision making around issues such as diverting inventory or resolving bottlenecks. Our solution lets shippers focus on the issues that affect supply chain performance by utilizing proactive alerts and event management to identify deviations. Users can define flexible business rules that display the status of any lifecycle milestone in the supply chain. These events can be followed back through transactions to the original purchase order for complete visibility into individual line items. For example, with ocean shipments, shippers can receive automatic notifications on status events for each container, such as date of receipt, vessel loaded, departed and arrived, transit, etc. Any shipment can be located or tracked by any one of several reference points, such as booking number, container number, or bill of lading number. |
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