Inbound Logistics | January 2025

10 TIPS

Achieving Effective Logistics Visibility

Funneling tracking data from multiple sources into core business processes to provide reliable arrival times reduces safety stock, bolsters resilience, and drives fulfillment.

1 CONNECT ONCE BUT COLLABORATE WITH MANY. Collect and standardize real-time data feeds from multiple providers to avoid developing custom integrations for each partner’s data. This helps harmonize tracking across carriers, modes, and geographies.

6 KEEP TECHNOLOGY LANDSCAPES SIMPLE. Procurement, manufacturing, and transportation solutions can grow in different directions, only to be strung back together through complex integrations. Look rst to add real-time shipment tracking that ts with your core systems before adding complexity, risk, and cost to your IT infrastructure to display real-time ETAs in your ERP and core systems. 7 BENEFIT FROM FLEXIBLE INTEGRATION. Modern document and data standards can help ensure shipment tracking is fully integrated with your core processes. With variability in data sources, exible integration capabilities are needed to bring information into a standard platform, making collaboration easier. Flexible integration is key to delivering insights and more predictable delivery times.

8 LEVERAGE AUTOMATION FOR NOTIFICATIONS. Procurement teams have to juggle unpredictable moments with repetitive, behind-the-scenes work. Automation of impact analyses, alerts and notications can offer much- needed relief during times of supply chain disruption. This enhances situational

2 BRIDGE BUSINESS INFORMATION GAPS. Organizational or system integration gaps can separate

tracking and execution statuses, event types, ows and viewing options. Building tailored tracking scenarios allows quick responses aligned with a company’s competitive advantage. 5 ACHIEVE INSIGHT TO ACTION. The faster procurement and production teams can act on new information, the more successful they can be. Avoid multiple external portals and instead funnel tracking information into your core systems. This helps speed responses by keeping necessary business documents available to manage business operations.

awareness to improve assurance of supply. 9 MAINTAIN ACCESS CONTROLS. The push and pull of

shipment tracking data from the related order management processes.

Connect external shipment tracking with your core order management systems to gain visibility into business processes and keep operations moving when disruptions occur. 3 HANDLE DISPARATE DATA SOURCES. Stay connected with multiple carriers, freight forwarders, and logistics providers through API or EDI. Companies can also collate that data in a single platform to handle parallel updates from different sources and mitigate the risk of disintegrated updates from multiple partners. 4 TAILOR THE TRACKING PROCESS. Procurement teams must apply exible and extensible congurations to custom elds, dening specic

managing user access and exporting data is not only a headache but also a security risk. Ensure that your shipment tracking capability maintains consistent user access and safeguards core business data, making available relevant and reliable information in a data-secure environment.

10 ENABLE A CONSISTENT AND

PERSONALIZED USER EXPERIENCE Even as AI continues to augment the user experience, people are still the key to driving informed procurement and production decisions. Ensure simple configuration of dashboards with a personalized view of shipments, deliveries and order fulfillment. Not only will this enable proactive exception management from a single source of truth, but your team can then also assess key performance indicators and set data- driven strategies.

SOURCE: DOUG DELUCA, BUSINESS NETWORK PRODUCT MARKETING MANAGER, SAP

18 Inbound Logistics • January 2025