If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s how fragile and fickle the global supply chain can be. Manufacturing companies all over the world produce goods and store them in warehouses—all before shipping them to customers around the world. Once an envelope, a package, or an entire fleet of shipping containers leaves your property, you are at the mercy of a number of shipping companies before your products reach your customers.

For many companies this process can be fraught. There can be many sleepless nights and frustrated customers—not to mention the stacks of tracking numbers, occasional email alerts, and (at least in the US) a postal service where “delivered” may only be a delivery person toying with you to meet their quotas.

How will you manage this complex process without adding more layers of complexity?

Integrate with the Tools You Already Have

The first step for managing your supply chain is to integrate with the tools you already have. If you are a manufacturing company using Ignition, that is a great place to start. Your plant floor may already be tied in with your customer ordering system. It may already be producing production schedules with a rules-based approach. And you might already have Ignition integrated into your warehouse management system, giving your warehouse staff up to the minute information when product comes off the line and is ready to be stored or shipped.

If you are like most manufacturing companies, this is probably where the integration ends. You might generate bills of lading and shipping labels in Ignition, but you would be the exception rather than the rule. It is time to change that.

To keep the integration going, check that your shipping provider has an API. Most of the popular shipping companies in the US (UPS, FedEx, and DHL) have an API. If you are shipping containers via ship or rail, there are a number of options depending on your carrier, including 3rd party APIs. You will run into more hurdles here given the rules and regulations of rail/ship travel, but it will not be impossible to get the information you need.

Real Time vs. Routes?

Do you want real-time tracking? Or will tracking where a shipment is along its journey be enough? Routes are easy. You simply pull in the location where the shipment originated, where it is going, and create a route between those places. From here, you can pull this information (including the shipment contents) into your database and update it as the shipment moves through the route.

You can have multiple open routes, showing the ones with active shipments on a map. You can then click any route to see what is currently in shipment.

If you want real-time tracking, there are a number of off-the-shelf GPS units you can get, or you can talk to us about hardware options. Units like these will give you real-time monitoring of where your shipments are anywhere in the world. You can even get creative and include temperature sensors, accelerometers, etc. to track the health of your shipment throughout.

The Benefits of Integrating Beyond the Warehouse

For most companies most of this tracking is overkill. For those who want to integrate beyond the warehouse wall, there are a lot of opportunities available. Here are just a few ideas:

• Generate shipping labels when production starts to begin alerting customers of product status throughout the manufacturing process

• Generate email alerts when shipments are scanned in at any given location

• Use shipment data to forecast delays. Feed this back into your customer order algorithms to adjust quantities of cyclic orders to meet demand

• Give your administrative staff access to all of your shipment information in a single user interface with all the relevant data. No more correlating bills of lading with orders and having to make phone calls to see where shipments are. Simply click on the map and have all the information available.

• Anticipate shipping delays in real-time so you can alert customers before they call you

• Coordinate shipment pickups to minimize logistics hassles and costs with a full view of everything at any given location in your network

In Closing

While systems like these are more bespoke than the one-size-fits-all approach of most business software, they can be extremely powerful. They can also provide you with a huge advantage in customer service capabilities over the competition. Being able to observe all your logistics in one place wherever you are can also give you great peace of mind.