Multimodal Shipping & International Growth: How is True Visibility Achieved?

"I'm sure you guys have heard a lot of discussions on this topic," said ITS Logistics CIO and SVP of Supply Chain Peter Weis. "It's not a new topic. It's been around for 30 years or more. It's a chronic issue now.

Some things have changed; the players have changed; some of the technologies have changed. Some of the old technologies are still around. EDI is still around. Excel uploads and manual data entry are still around. And then there are some new solutions that are offering some hope for at least incremental improvements: IoT and open APIs, which are not a savior, but they're going to be a nice jolt to the space. There's good old fashioned website scraping cloud TMSs that embed AI.

There are a lot of tools that are creating some incremental improvements in the space. But really, visibility is not a UI issue, it's not a user issue. It's about the data, and specifically about the movement of data. Accurate, complete, timely data moving all around the world.

Think about what happens from Shanghai to Chicago, how many events are there that you care about? How many parties are touching the data? How many different platforms are trying to make that data sing? That is really the overarching challenge and where we are today.

I want to work backwards from my dreamy vision—a global ecosystem of data that the whole world collectively can trust as products move around the world. Everyone would better off, and the rising tide would lift all boats if we could do that."

Watch the full session.