New FourKites’ offering focuses on improving order lifecycle processes

Chicago-based FourKites, a provider of real-time tracking and visibility solutions across transportation modes and digital platforms, said today it has introduced a new offering that provides a deeper dive into order lifecycles.

Entitled the Order Intelligence Hub, the company said that this offering provides what it calls “a single-pane-of-glass view of the entire lifecycle of every order.”

And it explained that the Order Intelligence Hub helps shippers and their supply chain partners in various ways, including: eliminating inefficiencies; managing expectations; reducing expenses and increasing overall customer satisfaction at every step of an order’s journey.

FourKites said that the Order Intelligence Hub, which was developed in close collaboration with major consumer packaged goods (CPG) customers and driven by insights from some of the largest companies in the Consumer Brands Association, identifies common pain points and creates a solution that addresses those challenges by breaking down silos between teams and systems, while leveraging the scale of the FourKites network to provide clear visibility into the CPG supply chain ecosystem.

Mathew Elenjickal, CEO of FourKites, provided LM with a detailed overview of the company’s Order Intelligence Hub, which follows below.

LM: What drove the need for FourKites to introduce this Order Intelligence Hub? How long had it been planned/in the works?

Elenjickal: The Order Intelligence Hub (OIH) was a customer-driven product for us. We were hearing from our customers and partners that there were key challenges around visibility around the complete lifecycle of an order. They wanted to be more efficient, optimize their planning and manage their inventory, but had silos within the organization and the systems they were using. During last year’s FourKites Visibility Conference, order tracking was our customers’ most-requested feature, mostly among our top retail and CPG customers.

We spent a significant amount of time collaborating with the Consumer Brands Association to truly understand the challenges that the top retail and CPG brands were facing. As a result, we were able to develop the Order Intelligence Hub solution that would break down these silos and resolve these challenges.

LM: What are the main benefits of this offering for customers? What does it provide that was previously missing?

Elenjickal: Many organizations use a number of systems, including order management systems, yard management, inventory management, TMS and other third-party solutions. These systems only show a piece of the puzzle. Not only are these systems siloed, but the stakeholder groups, such as customer service, transportation planning, supply planning and warehouse planning, are often siloed as well. With Order Intelligence Hub, we are breaking down barriers between these systems in order for organizations to increase inefficiencies, manage exceptions, reduce costs and increase customer satisfaction. One CPG brand is expecting $4B in efficiency and revenue lift by integrating Order Intelligence Hub.

Key benefits for our customers include having a single pane of glass for the full order lifecycle of an order; the ability to proactively manage impacts in real time and mitigate those issues; and identifying bottlenecks or problem areas, and using a data-driven approach to solve those challenges.

FourKites customers who use our Real-Time Transportation Visibility Platform and Dynamic Yard® solutions, alongside their TMS or other third-party systems, can see additional benefits from having one singular portal for all of their data and actionable intelligence. These include additional operational efficiencies, prioritized orders in the yard and sites, and exception management throughout the order lifecycle.

LM: Can you please provide a basic example of how the Order Intelligence Hub works?

Elenjickal: A great example is a common challenge experienced by Customer Service: a disruption at the facility impacting an outbound order to a customer. 

Without OIH, Customer Service may receive a daily report of all the orders they could not fulfill, due to inventory issues, missed appointments, dock capacity and more. By this time it's too late to get the order back on track, so the Customer Service rep will go through this report and replan each of the orders — coordinating with planning, transportation and the sites to establish a new delivery date.

With OIH, they are alerted in real time when an appointment is missed, or an order is not ready for pickup, and they can then collaborate in real time across their teams to resolve the exception. 

LM: What are the main competitive advantages of this offering from a FourKites perspective?

Elenjickal: We are the industry’s first solution for true end-to-end visibility for the full order lifecycle — this is a game changer. We are doing this by integrating with a number of solutions, including OMS and YMS, which results in breaking down silos to converge the order management and yard management solutions into an actionable, single source of truth for retail and CPG brands.

Additionally, we have customized dashboards for each stakeholder within an organization, providing the data and metrics that matter the most to each group.

Finally, FourKites has the largest supply chain visibility network. 600+ of the world’s most recognized brands — including 18 of the top-20 food and beverage companies and nine of the top-10 CPG companies — and 500,000 carriers trust FourKites to transform their business and create more agile, efficient and sustainable supply chains. The unrivalled breadth of FourKites’ data network, which comes from tracking over 2 million daily shipments across more than 176 countries, enables us to build the market’s most advanced AI and machine learning-driven solutions, which improve our customers’ bottom line through improved efficiency, enhanced customer satisfaction and reduced operational costs.