• Why quality insights are crucial for making informed business decisions
  • How the Forto Moments of Truth solution tackles the known supply chain transparency challenges
  • What the future holds for logistics visibility and beyond

Supply chain visibility is crucial in ensuring the smooth and efficient movement of goods across the globe. It is also critical for businesses to plan their manufacturing, sales, and inventory operations. Unfortunately, the industry has long struggled with incomplete visibility and low-quality data. 

This challenges the logistics and supply chain decision-makers in their daily battle against supply chain disruptions. The delayed and scattered shipment information often leads to missteps and slows down the action, which can be prevented if the right insight is promptly available to the decision maker. 

Forto recognizes these challenges and knows that the solution lies beyond merely reporting transport data. It’s about transforming this data available within the ecosystem into meaningful and actionable insights at every stage of the shipment. 

Moments of Truth (MoTs) is Forto’s visibility solution to tackle these challenges. MoTs empower businesses to make faster, more confident, and strategic logistics decisions, enabling more resilient supply chains.

The Importance of Quality Insights in Logistics Decision-Making

Although logistics generates vast amounts of data, most of this data is often unstructured, inaccurate, or incomplete. Because the data on its own does not provide sufficient context for the decision-makers to act on, companies struggle to achieve their desired level of supply chain transparency. The visibility problems can significantly impact supply chain operations, business risk assessment, and decision-making.

More specifically, the lack of quality and timely insights can obstruct successful shipment tracking and delivery, which we know are sources of frustration, stress, and concerns for logistics and supply chain managers. 

At a higher level, without good access to reliable information on shipments, supply chain planning may be ineffective, leading to increased costs, missed opportunities, and dissatisfied customers. This can harm a company’s financial performance, reputation, competitiveness, and customer relationships.
Accurate and complete visibility is crucial for successful logistics planning. However, quality data alone is insufficient; the insights from that data matter even more. 

Forto addresses this industry-wide gap of high-quality and timely insights through Moments of Truth.

Introducing the Forto Moments of Truth

Forto defines a Moment of Truth (MoT) as a critical event in the transport lifecycle that might impact the successful delivery of the planned shipment. To ensure the success of every planned shipment, Forto developed a new insights generation and notification system to proactively inform customers about the potential and realized deviations in their transports. 

After extensive customer research, Forto identified the first series of MoTs spanning the three main phases of a shipment lifecycle: Booking, Transport, and Delivery. Each identified MoT corresponds to a notification type sent to the customer via email or shown in the Forto platform. 

Each MoT notification is designed to show trustworthy insights into logistics events with relevant business impact. This enables supply chain managers to prevent the negative impact of transport disruption on planned shipments.

The first MoTs address some of the most urgent questions shippers might have:

  1. Cargo Ready Date – will the cargo be ready for the planned transport? 
  2. Rolled Cargo – will the container make it onto the vessel? 
  3. Main Carriage – will the main carriage depart and arrive on time?
  4. Customs –  did my goods go through import customs clearance? 
  5. Demurrage –  has the container left the port on time? 
  6. Detention – is the container returned on time?

Four additional MoTs will be tackled in 2023 and beyond:

  1. Booking initiated – does the supplier initiate booking on time?
  2. Booking confirmed – is the booking confirmed?
  3. Capacity – is the right capacity fulfilled at the right time?
  4. On-carriage – will the shipment arrive at the warehouse on time?

Critical Shipping Events that Forto’s new Visibility Solution MoTs tackles
This image highlights The Benefits of Forto’s Notifications, showcasing four key advantages that Forto’s notification system provides to its users in managing shipments and logistics. Visibility: The first benefit is visibility, represented by an icon of an eye within a screen, emphasizing constant awareness. The description explains that Forto’s notifications offer continuous updates on shipment status, keeping users informed about the location and condition of their goods in real-time. Efficiency: The second benefit is efficiency, symbolized by an icon resembling a network of connected nodes, indicating streamlined processes. Forto’s notifications reduce the time users spend tracking shipments manually, allowing for more efficient and productive use of resources. Strategic Planning: The third benefit, strategic planning, is represented by a target icon, highlighting the importance of foresight and preparation. The notifications enable users to anticipate and manage operational changes and costs, allowing for proactive planning to accommodate shifts in logistics or supply chain needs. Communication: The fourth benefit is communication, illustrated by an icon of a speech bubble, symbolizing dialogue and information exchange. Forto’s notifications support users in maintaining informed conversations with all stakeholders, ensuring that everyone involved has up-to-date information for effective coordination. In summary, Forto’s notifications enhance visibility, improve efficiency, support strategic planning, and facilitate better communication. These benefits enable businesses to stay informed, reduce manual tracking, anticipate changes, and coordinate seamlessly with stakeholders, ultimately creating a smoother and more efficient logistics experience.

The Forto Moments of Truth Insights Engine: Powering Superior Supply Chain Visibility

But how does this work? The Forto MoTs are powered by a sophisticated decision-making system we named the MoT Insights Engine (MoTIE). This technology solution runs on proprietary algorithms to collect, cleanse and process data from multiple sources. These include the Forto-developed and owned transport management system (TMS), integrations with industry partners, and data aggregators. MoTIE is the core technology that identifies patterns and derives insights based on the processed data.

The quality of the data is guaranteed through a combination of an always-on data monitoring solution that processes 1.2 million data points each month, automated alert mechanisms, and a quality reporting cockpit encompassing over 20 data quality criteria.

From the Backend to the Frontend: Delivering Superior Supply Chain Visibility

In addition to the MoT-specific emails, Forto customers receive data-driven insights generated by the MoTIE through the Notification Centre, a new interface incorporated into the Forto digital platform. The main job of the Notification Center is to provide visibility over the MoTs and do so with the right data, at the right time, and with the right context. And, the system allows customers to customize the frequency and format of the notifications that best suits their needs.   

MoT notifications can be classified into three categories of events that trigger the notification based on the urgency and impact of that event:

  • Update notifications provide visibility over critical events to keep users informed about the status of essential milestones of the transport.
  • Deviation risk notifications provide visibility over events that signal a projected risk of deviation, allowing the logistics decision-makers and Forto operations to take preventative action to mitigate the deviation. 
  • Deviation notifications provide visibility over realized deviations from the original transport plan, enabling the logistics decision-makers and Forto operations to resolve and/or replan transport details, mitigating the effects and minimizing the cost of the shipment deviation.

These notifications help decision-makers understand the risk and impact of potential and realized disruptions to adjust their action plans accordingly.

How the New Visibility Feature blends in with Forto’s Technology
The image is structured in layers, showing Forto’s approach to providing end-to-end visibility in the supply chain. At the top, there is a row labeled Data Sources, which includes various stages of the shipping process, listed from left to right: Pre-carriage Partner, Customs Office, Port of Loading, Carriers, Port of Destination, Customs Office, and On-carriage Partner. These stages represent the different points at which data is gathered throughout the supply chain. Below the data sources, a long dark bar labeled Integration Gateway System spans the width of the data sources row, indicating that this system consolidates and manages information from each source to maintain data quality. Under the Integration Gateway System, the image has two boxes side by side labeled Automatic System Checks. These boxes contain: Data Cross-Referencing on the left Automatic Plausibility Checks on the right These checks are shown as processes that automatically validate data quality. Below these automatic checks is another layer labeled Operational Checks, with two boxes side by side: Shipment Health on the left Digital Checklists on the right These checks ensure that operations meet certain standards and requirements. At the bottom of the image, there is a long blue bar labeled Forto Platform Features, spanning the entire width. This bar lists various tools and services that Forto offers, in sequence from left to right: Quotes & Rates Automated Booking Transport Plan & Shipment Mgmt Machine Learning Prediction Automated Invoicing NEW Moments of Truth Notifications Each section in this structured visual explains a different aspect of Forto’s visibility solution, progressing from data sources at the top to platform features at the bottom.

Our Vision for the Future: From Visibility to Predictability

Visibility is only the beginning for the Forto Moments of Truth and the technology behind them. We plan to continuously evolve and scale our offering from visibility to incorporate action-oriented suggestions that enable logistics managers to take insights-driven corrective action to prevent and minimize the impact of supply chain disruptions. 

Conclusion

In conclusion, while supply chain visibility remains a significant challenge in the logistics industry, Forto is developing innovative solutions that rise to the challenge. Moments of Truth deliver exceptional visibility and insights into the most critical events at every stage of the lifecycle of a shipment. Forto customers gain the power to make faster, more accurate, and more strategic decisions. As a result, decision-makers and logistics professionals can ensure more resilient logistics operations, leading to more resilient supply chains. Forto is continuously improving its technological capabilities and expanding its service offering to ensure that shippers can tackle known logistics challenges confidently.

Join the Future of Supply Chain Visibility now with Forto Moments of Truth

If you want to experience the power of tech-enabled logistics and make your supply chains more resilient, join the future of visibility with Forto. You can build truly resilient logistics operations with the Moments of Truth initiative.