When you consider the complex journey of an item going from an overseas factory to a retailer’s shelf – and specifically how many different parties want to know about it – it’s amazing.
The life cycle of a purchase order involves many players, many systems and many transfers from hand to hand. From the moment a merchandising team places an order with an overseas factory, people at every point in the process want to know what’s going on.
The retailer wants to know the date and time it will be possible to put the product on the shelf.
The distribution center team is constantly being asked when they will have the product, so they’re trying to keep tabs on it as much as they can.
The transportation team wants to know where the product is. Still at the factory? On an ocean liner? Arriving at the port? This information is critical in planning how and when to retrieve the item for ground transport.
And of course, the merchandising team wants updates every step along the way.
Everyone wants to know where their products are. And that’s complicated, because there used to be no one place you could go to get the information.
The factory in China had one source of data. The ocean liner had another, and so does the port, and so does the trucking company. And the distribution center had yet another source of data, just like the retailer.
Consider the perspective of the retailer, highly anticipating the arrival of these products with an ambitious plan to promote them. At any given moment in the lifecycle of this purchase order, that retailer wants to know the status.
Unfortunately, the retailer doesn’t know if the product left the factory, although he could try calling the merchandising team or even the Chinese factory to find out. Once it leaves the dock in China, the retailer could try to access the ocean liner’s system, or contact the port operator, who might know when the ship is expected.
Has the product been loaded onto the truck and left the port? The carrier’s system should know. Then again, if it’s stopping at a distribution center, the warehouse operator will log it when it arrives, so maybe that’s who to contact for an update.
That’s crazy. But it’s also what happens when there are so many systems logging their information.
The only thing you could do was go to these siloed systems looking for the information, unless you want to send out e-mails to everyone involved with the process asking, “Who has it?”
If you’re tired of scrambling, searching for your orders, AgiSight was made to solve this problem.
We get the data from everyone involved with the process, in real time, and present it for you in a single dashboard. It doesn’t matter if you’re a carrier, a 3PL, the warehouse operator or part of the merchandising team. You can log into AgiSight and see exactly where the product is, and when it’s expected to move to the next phase of the process.
For merchants who make their money on sell-throughs, this depends heavily on you having availability of the point of sale (POS). AgiSight gives you that visibility.
Most people know how to get notifications on their phones from UPS or FedEx. Most shippers know how to get real-time data from a carrier. But rarely do you see all of this data pulled together in a single location that allows people to make the best use of it.
No one has put the entire lifecycle of a purchase order on a single dashboard, giving everyone the same information at the same time, until now.
It’s time for our supply chain industry to stop spending so much time and effort tracking down siloed data. Embrace AgiSight and get the results that will transform your supply chains.
