5 signs your business has a supply chain visibility problem

Getting a shipment from A to B is only half the job. The other half is knowing where it is along the way, and whether it’s going to arrive when it’s supposed to. Without that, you’re planning around a guess—and that guess can quickly become expensive if it turns out to be wrong.

Unfortunately, visibility is harder to come by than it should be. PwC’s most recent Digital Trends in Operations Survey found that only a third of supply chain leaders use connected tracking in their operations, which means most are navigating with less information than they need. Here’s what that gap tends to look like in practice.

If your team still relies on phone calls and emails to check where a shipment is, that’s a clear sign your supply chain visibility isn’t as good as it should be.

First, whatever you’re told on the call is already old news by the time you hear it. Second, this way of tracking shipments doesn’t scale: as you take on more volume, there are simply more loads moving at once than any one person can call about individually. And third, because a manual check only happens when someone remembers to make it, you tend to find out something’s gone wrong only after it’s too late to do much about it.

Another sign of a supply chain blind spot is getting a one-off ETA: a single estimate given once, at the start of the journey, that never changes after. Because nothing updates in real-time, the ETA can’t reflect what’s happening to your shipment along the way, whether it’s running early, running late, or held up somewhere it shouldn’t be.

This matters because other things get built around your ETA, regardless of how accurate it is. Warehouse teams, for example, schedule labour based on when a shipment is expected to arrive, so a wrong ETA means either paying for staff who end up waiting around, or scrambling to cover a shipment that turns up with no warning. And because any delivery promise you’ve made to a customer relies on that same number, an ETA you can’t trust puts those promises at risk too.

If you can see a delay coming, your team can act on it before it becomes a problem: adjusting the dock schedule, or letting the customer know ahead of time. If you can’t, the first you hear about a delay is often the shipment itself turning up late, or not turning up at all. At that point, there’s nothing left to do but react.

The more often this happens, the more it shapes the working day. Time that should go into planning ahead (reviewing lanes, forecasting demand, or fixing whatever caused the last delay) gets taken up by whatever’s gone wrong right now instead. Over time, this means the team ends up spending most of its energy responding to problems, rather than getting ahead of them.

If you don’t know when a shipment will turn up, the natural response is to keep extra stock on hand, just in case it’s late. That extra stock is essentially insurance against uncertainty.

But that insurance comes at a cost. Money tied up in extra stock is money that isn’t free to use elsewhere in the business, and it takes up warehouse space too. It’s worth asking why your buffer is the size it is. If it’s there because your customers are buying more, that’s a normal part of growing the business. If it’s there because you can’t rely on deliveries arriving when expected, that’s a sign of a visibility problem, not a demand problem, and it’s worth solving at the source rather than just holding more stock to cover for it.

If a customer tells you about a delay before your own team has spotted it, that’s about as clear a sign as you’ll get that something’s missing. It means the people who should know first are finding out last.

This makes the delay itself harder to manage. Your customer service team ends up responding to a problem they had no way to see coming, with no early warning to soften the message or offer alternatives. And being the last to know about your own shipment makes it harder to reassure a customer that you’re on top of things, even when you are.

Each of these signs might seem manageable on its own. But together, the costs add up. Here’s how.

Every hour spent piecing together where a shipment has got to is time your team isn’t spending on planning, improving the operation, or dealing with customers. On its own, one call doesn’t cost much. Multiplied across a team chasing several shipments a day, every day, that adds up to a meaningful chunk of the working week spent tracking things down rather than moving the business forward.

That cost is easy to miss because it doesn’t show up as a single expense anywhere. It’s spread thinly across the week, in interruptions and half-finished tasks.

Customers don’t expect every shipment to run perfectly. What they do expect is to be told the truth about it, early enough to make other plans if they need to. When that doesn’t happen, they notice, and it costs you more than the complaint itself.

A complaint at least gives you the chance to put things right. The bigger risk is the customer who doesn’t complain at all. They just quietly start comparing you against other options, and move their business elsewhere next time without saying why. Trust, once it’s been called into question, takes a long time to earn back.

When a delay is only discovered once it’s already happened, the options left to solve it are usually the expensive ones. A shipment that’s going to miss its delivery slot might need an emergency courier, a split shipment, or a rebooked pickup, none of which would have been necessary if the delay had been visible early enough to plan around it instead.

These costs rarely show up as a pattern, because each one looks like a one-off. But it’s the same underlying problem showing up again and again: the fix costs more precisely because there was no warning it was needed.

Digital booking means arranging a shipment through an online portal rather than by phone or email. You get pricing and availability on screen, and confirm the booking there and then. Real-time tracking works alongside it. Once a shipment is moving, its location and status are visible in the same portal, updating automatically as your shipment moves.

Together, they replace the back-and-forth with information you can see for yourself, whenever you need it. Here’s how this helps you increase trust and productivity.

Booking freight the old way usually means calling or emailing to find out what’s available and what it’ll cost, then waiting to hear back before you can plan anything properly. With digital booking, that information is there for you to see straight away, so you can confirm a booking on the spot instead of losing time waiting on a reply.

That’s especially useful when you need to book at short notice. Checking a portal takes minutes; waiting for someone to call you back doesn’t. And because your team isn’t tied up waiting on replies, that time goes back into whatever else needs doing.

As well as being able to book freight instantly, a digital freight experience lets you see how your shipment is progressing in real time. You’ll see the shipment’s current status and a timestamped record of milestones along the way, so you never have to chase up yourself to find out where things stand.

Put all of this together, and the shape of an average day changes. Fewer calls chasing carriers for an update. ETAs your team can actually plan around, rather than work around. And time back for the strategic work that makes a difference.

Amazon Freight brings Amazon’s advanced technology to the middle mile. The self-service online portal lets you book freight in just a few steps, with online freight quotes and transparent spot and contract rates available upfront—no waiting on a call back to find out what a lane will cost.

Once your shipment is in transit, GPS-tracked trailers mean you always know where your load is in real time. And with autorouting capabilities, your freight is kept moving along the fastest available route, which means fewer of the delays that turn into an ETA you can’t trust.

Digitalise your supply chain operations with the support of Amazon Freight. Create your free shipper account today to get started.

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