Using a TMS to Solve the Visibility Challenge

When you think about visibility and tracking in your daily life, you might remember that $25 item you bought online and how you watched its movement across the country until it arrived at your doorstep.

The term “visibility” in a B2C environment usually means “tracking.”

In the B2B world, visibility is far more complicated. B2B visibility is really start-to-finish order visibility: from order placement, allocation/manufacturing, and warehousing through delivery and payment.

“Visibility” in a B2B environment means systematically interpreting and combining inter-enterprise data from many sources + artificial intelligence and workflow to react. It’s assessing the past, monitoring/reacting in the present and adjusting for the future. But getting visibility into the logistics flow has traditionally been either very expensive or produced limited results because:

• There are different data sources: ERPs, portals, EDI, WMS, etc.
• There are different languages: Customers talk in orders and POs, carriers send data in shipments and loads, finance needs invoices and vouchers
• There are different data relationships: Many orders to a shipment; many POs to an invoice; many carriers on a single route
• Internal systems (ERP, OMS, WMS, Finance) and external parties (3PLs, carriers, vendors, customers)

These differences have made true TMS visibility extremely difficult and near impossible for any organization – except those with deep pocketbooks who can set up control tower projects that require lots of personnel and massive integration projects.

That’s changed.