- 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:
- Cargo Ready Date – will the cargo be ready for the planned transport?
- Rolled Cargo – will the container make it onto the vessel?
- Main Carriage – will the main carriage depart and arrive on time?
- Customs – did my goods go through import customs clearance?
- Demurrage – has the container left the port on time?
- Detention – is the container returned on time?
Four additional MoTs will be tackled in 2023 and beyond:
- Booking initiated – does the supplier initiate booking on time?
- Booking confirmed – is the booking confirmed?
- Capacity – is the right capacity fulfilled at the right time?
- On-carriage – will the shipment arrive at the warehouse on time?
Critical Shipping Events that Forto’s new Visibility Solution MoTs tackles
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
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.
Watch the demo to see how the MoTs come to life:
Already convinced? Contact Forto today to learn how Forto Moments of Truth can transform your logistics decision-making!
