Real-time visibility: The key to building a resilient supply chain

You know the visibility challenges all too well. There are urgent shipments that people are waiting for. There may be dependencies on those shipments which are holding up processes inside your organisation. Or even worse, your customers are expecting a delivery which hasn’t arrived – and you can’t even tell them where it currently is. Visibility of your shipments is a key business insight at the best of times. During an extraordinary situation such as the coronavirus pandemic, it’s even more vital.

Covid-19’s impact on the world has been sudden, with public health systems pushed to their limits. The pandemic has also affected businesses, bringing uncertainty and disorder to supply chains globally. During these challenging times, it is important to have an overview of your operations and resources. You need up-to-date information in order to flexibly cope with. Increasing visibility is therefore an essential step towards building a resilient supply chain.

Introducing eTrucknow, Kuehne+Nagel’s road logistics product

We understand how important visibility of your shipments is, and have created eTrucknow to address these challenges. eTrucknow is an exciting new product from Kuehne+Nagel that gives you oversight of your road shipments and improves the efficiency of your supply chain. You can use eTrucknow as a cloud solution to manage your own fleet, or simply integrate the service into your business and rely on our qualified fleet of truckers. You can access eTrucknow’s intelligent dashboard on both desktop and mobile devices, putting vital shipment insights at your fingertips. Getting quotes and booking your shipments has never been easier, but what about visibility?

Know where your shipments are at all times

To ensure that you always know where your shipments are, eTrucknow is designed with visibility as an integral feature. You can easily track your shipments and stay updated from pick-up through to final delivery. Set up push notifications to receive updates and share your shipment information with customers or colleagues in real-time. Visibility isn’t just about peace of mind for you and your customers – it can also save travel time and assist with dock scheduling.

Companies who have full visibility of their shipments are better able to respond to their customers’ needs, particularly during challenging times such as a pandemic. Visibility provides accurate and timely information for both customers and internal stakeholders, reducing the need to send emails about shipments. This has beneficial flow-on effects for your organisation - with increased transparency also comes better productivity, enabling you to make better decisions based on accurate information.

eTrucknow tracks your vehicles with live GPS, providing the real-time locations of all your shipments from your dashboard. You can plan better knowing the estimated delivery times of each shipment, and the collaboration features make it simple to share this information. Stay in control of your operations with event time stamps and alert notifications. There’s even a feature which uses geofencing and cross-border technology to alert you when certain milestones are reached. Want an email notification when your shipment has reached a certain point or crossed a border? It’s simple to set up and you’ll have access to better insights instantly.

Staying safe and avoiding risk

Visibility is about more than just location – it also includes being aware of the state and safety of your shipments. Risk management is an essential element of a resilient supply chain. For the safety of both your drivers and your shipments, high-risk areas must be avoided. During a pandemic, these areas change daily which makes planning routes difficult. eTrucknow addresses this uncertainty by keeping track of "red zones" – areas that currently have a high rate of coronavirus infections – and pre-emptively warning you if your shipment will travel through one, so that a deviation through a safer area can be made. Blue chip companies have access to even more insights, with visibility features including critical vehicle information such as average driving speed, hours of service and bumpy route alerts.

Kuehne+Nagel’s extensive network, advanced transport management system and digital collaboration tools ensure that you always have full awareness of your shipments – making your supply chain resilient and capable of adjusting to disruption. However you use eTrucknow, whether as a cloud service for your own fleet, or as an integrated solution, you will enjoy full visibility of all your shipments – wherever they may be.

Be prepared and stay in control with eTrucknow. Find out more here or schedule a demo with us.