Mission-Critical Visibility for Mission-Critical Components
When a single lost shipment costs millions, you need more than tracking—you need autonomous supply chain orchestration.
Your global aerospace supply chain moves time-sensitive, high-value components across multiple freight forwarders and transportation modes. Manual status checks and supplier coordination consume hours daily while parts worth millions move without real-time visibility. One lost shipment triggered your search for a solution. FourKites ensures it never happens again.
Navigating Turbulence in Global Aerospace Logistics
Your supply chain faces challenges unique to aerospace and defense:
When Supplier Visibility Goes Dark You depend on suppliers worldwide who manage their own freight—often through multiple forwarders. Without automated coordination, your teams spend hours chasing status updates across time zones via email and phone s. Meanwhile, components sit in customs, miss connections, or worse—disappear entirely. With individual parts worth millions, every blind spot carries catastrophic financial and operational risk.
The Oracle-SAP Visibility Gap Your Oracle TMS and SAP ERP track what’s booked and what’s received—but the journey between those two points remains a black box. You can’t see PO-level status in real-time. You don’t know which inbound shipments will miss production schedules until it’s too late. And when stakeholders ask “where is my order,” your team scrambles through multiple systems and forwarder portals searching for answers that should be automatic.
International Air & Parcel at Scale Ocean freight isn’t an option when aerospace components are urgently needed. Your international air and parcel shipments move through complex networks where a single delay cascades into production disruptions. Multi-modal complexity across air, truck, and rail requires manual coordination that slows response times when exceptions occur. By the time you learn about a problem, your options to resolve it have already narrowed.
Cleared for Takeoff: AI-Powered Supply Chain Command
FourKites transforms aerospace supply chain visibility from reactive tracking to proactive, autonomous orchestration
AI Agent Sam
Sam: Autonomous Shipment Creation from Supplier Documents
Stop depending on suppliers for updates. Sam, our AI-powered Digital Workforce agent, automatiy ingests documents from your global supplier base and creates complete order and shipment records—no manual data entry, no supplier portal logins, no waiting. The moment a supplier ships, Sam builds the tracking foundation automatiy. For Lockheed Martin’s supplier network, this means visibility starts at origin, not when a forwarder finally updates their system.
AI Agent Tracy
Tracy: 24/7 Freight Forwarder Coordination Without Human Intervention
Your team no longer needs to send status request emails to freight forwarders across different time zones. Tracy monitors all shipments automatiy, retrieves status updates around the clock, and escalates exceptions requiring human attention. Multiple forwarders across global lanes? Tracy coordinates them simultaneously. The result: 2-3 hours saved per person daily, 90% reduction in manual tracking tasks, and 50% reduction in coordination emails within the first 8 months.
Intelligent Control Tower
Intelligent Control Tower: One Platform for All Transportation Modes
Consolidate air, ocean, rail, and truck visibility into a single interface. Whether components ship via international air freight, parcel, or multi-modal routes, you see real-time status, predictive ETAs, and exception alerts in one place. No more toggling between forwarder portals or chasing down different teams for different modes. Your Oracle TMS and SAP ERP integrate seamlessly, extending their value with the real-time execution layer they lack.
Predictive Intelligence
Predictive Intelligence Across Your Supplier Network
FourKites analyzes real-time data from 3.2 million daily shipments across 1,600+ global supply chains to predict delivery failures weeks before impact. When a high-value component faces delay risk, you know early enough to act—reroute shipments, expedite alternatives, or adjust production schedules before the crisis hits your plant floor. This isn’t hindsight; it’s foresight that protects both your production timelines and your bottom line.
Security-First Architecture
Security-First Architecture for Defense Contractors
Unlike visibility providers that track shipments through China-based infrastructure, FourKites maintains security protocols aligned with defense industry requirements. We don’t track through geopolitical risk zones, ensuring your supply chain data stays within allied infrastructure. As you navigate CMMC compliance requirements for your supplier base, our architecture supports your security posture rather than complicating it.
Payload Delivered: Measurable ROI Across Operations
Aerospace and defense manufacturers using FourKites achieve transformation across operations
Operational Efficiency Gains
- 90% reduction in manual tracking tasks – Your team focuses on exceptions, not status checks
- 2-3 hours saved per person daily – Logistics coordinators manage more shipments with existing headcount
- 50% reduction in email volume within 8 months – Automated updates replace coordination overhead
- 5x faster supplier onboarding – New suppliers integrate in days, not weeks, without portal requirements
Financial Impact
- Weeks of advance notice of disruptions – Time to act before expedited freight becomes necessary
- Reduced expedited shipping costs – Proactive exception management eliminates last-minute air freight premium
- Lower detention and demurrage fees – Predictive alerts prevent missed pickup windows and port storage charges
- Right-sized inventory buffers – Visibility confidence reduces safety stock requirements by 0.5-1%
Production Schedule Protection
Within 90 days of implementation, aerospace manufacturers typiy see measurable improvement in on-time delivery to production lines. When you’re coordinating inbound materials for aircraft assembly or defense systems integration, schedule predictability directly impacts program milestones, customer commitments, and contract performance. FourKites provides the delivery certainty your production schedules demand.
Strategic Alignment with Digital Transformation
Your investments in Oracle, SAP, and Kinaxis demonstrate commitment to supply chain excellence. FourKites extends this foundation with the real-time execution and AI-driven automation layer that complements enterprise planning systems. Our AI agents—trained on billions of shipments—deliver supply chain intelligence impossible to build internally, aligning perfectly with your 21st Century Security digital transformation vision and CIO Manni Walia’s Digital and IT Center of Excellence initiatives.
Disclaimer: ROI estimates based on industry benchmarks and Gartner research. FourKites Value Engineering team will develop a Lockheed Martin-specific impact model during discovery.
FourKites is Trusted by Global Manufacturers
Mission Control Ready: Transform Your Supply Chain Visibility
Your aerospace supply chain is too complex and too critical for manual coordination. Let's discuss how FourKites' Intelligent Control Tower® and AI-powered Digital Workforce can deliver the autonomous visibility and exception management your operations demand.