If you have ever had a vision examination with an optometrist, you know that the process is filled with options and decisions – from which strength of prescription best improves your vision, to which frames for the lenses best suite your needs.
Achieving logistics visibility for your supply chain is similar in that the endeavor poses many options and decisions. Supply chain and transportation professionals looking to increase logistics visibility will quickly reach a first decision point,
“How do I get milestone event or real-time visibility data to track shipments?”
And once faced with that question, then the path toward insightful logistics visibility turns to,
“How do I manage and leverage the visibility data to make my supply chain and fulfillment more efficient, predictable and resilient?”
SAP Business Network Global Track and Trace answers both questions by providing a single solution that handles different types of logistics visibility data from a world of sources, while delivering the visibility information in the context of core business processes for more insightful awareness and proactive decision making.
SAP Business Network Global Track and Trace connects the physical movement of goods with a corresponding information flow that improves situational awareness beyond milestone reporting. Businesses rely on this solution to improve supply and delivery assurance by tracking orders and shipments in real time, enabling exception detection, and revealing actionable insights that break down company silos.
But early in the logistics visibility journey, when faced with the questions posed above, supply chain and transportation professionals are likely to initially encounter data services that provide shipment tracking based on export of a business’ core shipment information. Or, it is likely that a carrier or freight forwarder may offer shipment tracking capability, either through a uniquely developed data-push, or through access to a separate tracking portal hosted by the service provider.
In either of these circumstances, the shipper or receiver is sacrificing two key aspects of logistics visibility:
- Flexibility – to leverage visibility data from multiple sources covering the unique business processes of their organization
- Integrated business context – to transform visibility data into insight and action for supply and customer delivery assurance
To explore this further, logistics visibility through SAP Business Network Global Track and Trace enables seven distinct benefits over and above an individual visibility platform or service.
1. Connect once, collaborate with many
SAP’s solution harmonizes and aggregates tracking across networks, transportation modes and geographies, through real-time data feeds normalized from multiple regional and global visibility providers. As a core tenet of SAP Business Network, you can connect to SAP Business Network once, and collaborate consistently with the growing number of trading partners that connect to the network at your request, or of their own desire to grow new business.
Avoid development and maintenance of custom integrations with different carriers or visibility data service providers.
2. Agnostic to data sources
SAP Business Network Global Track and Trace enables processing of real-time and milestone updates in parallel from directly connected carriers, freight forwarders and logistics service providers via API or EDI. In other words, you have options. Visibility from carriers already providing visibility data to the network can be a primary option, or have your carriers leverage open APIs or EDI to start sending data to the network – or go with a regional or global visibility data service already connected to the network. And if your needs change, you have options with other new or existing network partners without changing your one interface with the network.
Here, the key point is: optimal logistics visibility maximizes the opportunity for data sources while normalizing the data delivered in the context of your business processes.
Avoid disintegrated event updates from disparate partners.
3. Impact analysis
Receiving alerts, including deviations from overarching shipping or Purchase, Sales or Stock Transfer order fulfillment plans through SAP Business Network Global Track and Trace, is key to seeing the impact of deviations from the plan along the related business process. In addition to out-of-the-box processes for to core business processes, SAP’s visibility solution provides native flexibility in process modeling, as well as deep content to drive alerts, notifications, search, filter, monitoring, and logging, to answer questions like, “Will production be delayed?” and “Which customers are affected?”
Avoid gaps between transportation logistics and the related business context.
4. Insight-to-action
SAP Business Network Global Track and Trace increases situational awareness through natively embedded real-time progress updates on a map linked to rich business (ERP) context for faster, better decision making. In addition to out-of-the-box processes and native process modeling, event-to-action capability enables flexible connections and triggers between events, configurable statues, and actions that enable you to develop a more agile, responsive, and proactive approach to supply chain resilience and delivery assurance.
Avoid look-up tables between business documents and shipment tracking numbers.
5. Standard, flexible, and seamless integration
Seamless feedback of real-time ETA and other key information into SAP S/4HANA, including SAP Transportation Management, is key. With SAP Business Network Global Track and Trace, core business data stays in your native environment, without risk or complexity of export and transmission of Purchase, Sales, or Stock Transfer order data to an outside platform. The connection between shipment tracking and risk data is directly integrated with your core fulfillment and supply chain processes, with native access to customer and production data for enhanced insight and awareness without gaps.
Avoid adding complexity to your IT landscape supporting transportation and supply chain logistics.
6. Flexible, consistent, and personalized user experience
SAP’s solution allows businesses to maintain consistent user access through standard and configurable roles. By leveraging consistent user access, teams only see and act on what is relevant. Training on new systems or interfaces with new data or service platforms is avoided, keeping your supply chain team efficient and effective focusing on core processes.
Avoid duplicate user access or insufficient access controls.
7. Tailored to your tracking processes
Leverage flexible and extensible setup with SAP Business Network Global Track and Trace, supported by standard apps and templates, while still being able to define custom fields, tracking and execution statuses, event types and event-to-action scripts when needed, or build custom scenarios from scratch. SAP’s solution enables you to run business processes uniquely, while maintaining a platform that can natively integrate logistics visibility information from any network carrier or data provider.
Avoid process variations from different platform setup and capabilities.
Leveraging these benefits while avoiding the pitfalls listed above is key to effectively achieving logistics visibility. Not only does SAP’s visibility solution help to drive the risk out of supply chain logistics, but it also helps to drive the risk out of a business’s pursuit to master this critical competency.
To learn more about how SAP Business Network Global Track and Trace establishes a firm and flexible foundation for logistics visibility, please see below a side-by-side comparison with individual visibility platforms, and reach out through the Contact Us button on SAP.com.
Hear and read more from SAP Business Network Global Track and Trace customers Blue Diamond Growers, B/S/H, and Al Dahra.
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