Manufacturing comes with many challenges, and supply chain complexity can often top that list. Things seem to grow more convoluted every year, and managing the tangled webs of shipping stops and intermediaries demands more effort and attention.

Thankfully, technology tries to close gaps and simplify supply chain management. With better tracking and visibility tools, it’s easier than ever to see where your goods are, how they’re moving, and what that means in terms of the big picture.

Today, you can learn about the essentials of freight visibility to see how it changes manufacturing from multiple perspectives.

Understanding Freight Visibility

Freight visibility refers to the cumulative tools and resources that allow stakeholders to track and monitor shipments in real time. At its best, freight visibility allows you to see every step of the supply chain in great detail. At its worst, you get fragmented views as different steps in the chain offer varying degrees of participation.

In order to create freight visibility, systems use a combination of GPS, IoT, mobile apps, and additional tools. All of these data generators can throw information into a centralized platform that makes information sharing and tracking easy. You can even integrate freight visibility resources with your existing systems to track KPIs.

How does this create value in manufacturing?

Largely, freight visibility empowers decisions. When you can see the movement of goods in real time, you can make more informed decisions. If delays or issues arise, you know as soon as possible, allowing for faster responses. Additionally, the data included in freight visibility allows you to see more options and navigate issues deftly.

The more you can see in your supply chain, the better you can pivot to face challenges as soon as they arise. With advanced analytics, you can even anticipate problems and create solutions before they arise.

How Freight Visibility Changes Manufacturing

Taking a closer look, we can see specific means by which freight visibility improves manufacturing outlooks.

Incoming Resources

From a manufacturing standpoint, freight visibility enables you to see incoming resources. In an increasingly complicated manufacturing supply chain, bolts may be fabricated in one place while components they fasten together come from a different continent. Part of a device might be assembled here, with the next step taking place in another country.

Seeing the big picture in real time allows you to track the moving parts and act accordingly.

With freight visibility, you can search for alternative sources and routes when shipments hit a snag. You can find the best ways to increase your resources for demand spikes, and you can search for the most cost-effective solutions during demand droughts.

Outgoing Products

Tracking shipments when you fulfill orders holds just as much value. Whether you ship to final customers or the next stage in a larger process, viewing the freight allows you to manage fulfillment and maintain customer satisfaction.

In addition to the benefits already discussed, freight visibility also empowers forecasting. In terms of fulfillment, the data generated by your visibility resources help create strong trendlines that enable you to anticipate demand more accurately. Whether you plan for peak-season logistics or off-peak lulls, information drives your decisions.

This helps to reduce overstock and enables higher precision in manufacturing totals, enabling you to fine-tune production over long periods of time.

All the while, visibility helps you manage fulfillment with greater reliability, as you can use insights to make better shipping decisions.

The Big Picture

From the perspective of an individual manufacturing facility, freight visibility shows clear value. More information is typically a good thing, but freight visibility is redefining U.S. supply chains, and it all comes back to complexity.

A more complex supply chain can be difficult to navigate, but it allows for increased specialization. Manufacturers can insert themselves as a single step in a bigger, multi-step process. This can lower the cost of goods and shipping as specialists can hone their craft and analytical tools, and AI can optimize shipping.

Visibility provides more than a quick glance at your goods with a GPS tracker. It creates large volumes of data that you and your computer tools can use to find hidden insights and optimizations. It improves flow and consistency in an increasingly complicated environment. This allows manufacturers to fill gaps and perform better.

As more stages in freight and manufacturing adopt visibility, every player gets more information and the benefits that come with it.

Implementing Freight Visibility

So, how do you get more freight visibility? Mostly, it comes down to your partners. Whoever you utilize for logistics should offer more visibility. You can search for centralized logistics software that helps you make use of everything, but your biggest resources are your shipping and warehousing providers.