I write and speak often about the nearly limitless potential of widespread collaboration across the supply chain industry to improve operations and deliver better business outcomes. Equally critical is the technology platform that underpins this collaboration.
This week, we announced one of the most consequential upgrades to FourKites’ real-time transportation visibility platform in the history of the company, giving users across the enterprise – transportation teams, warehouse teams, inventory managers, executive leadership – unprecedented access to the critical supply chain information they need to drive faster resolutions, proactively manage exceptions, and provide better reporting to their supply chain partners.
These new capabilities represent a major leap forward in implementing FourKites’ vision to enable supply chain visibility into everything, everywhere – and further cement our position as the real-time visibility platform of choice for the world’s largest enterprises with the most complex use cases.
As founder and CEO, I am extremely proud of the contributions of so many teams and individuals who made this leap forward possible. And as an engineer at heart, I can attest that delivering such powerful capabilities – in an elegant, user-friendly interface that our customers routinely praise – requires the highest levels of technical sophistication, together with flawless execution.
This is, of course, what the greatest technology teams do: mask backend technical complexity while delivering superior ease of use and value to customers. This is core to how we approach platform development, and it manifests in many ways.
With this new release, we have created an intelligent integration layer across all transportation modes, and data automatically syncs between the platform’s real-time transportation tracking, Appointment Manager and Dynamic Yard® applications. What that means for customers is that they can see all of their data, all in one place. That translates directly into delivering faster, more contextualized multimodal insights that drive ROI across all teams.
Integration with other systems is also critical work, which is why we have broken down the silos between warehouse systems, order management systems, transportation management systems and the like. We’ve integrated with hundreds of partner technologies and systems over the years, enabling various departments across our customers’ organizations to turn to a single source of the truth, while more accurately managing the various aspects of their particular workflows.
What does this look like in practice? Strategy and leadership teams might set up alerts to be notified of production line disruptions and details about impacted orders. Transportation teams can drill into their top bottlenecks by facility, carrier performance, dwell time and volume. Inbound/procurement teams can view SKUs at facilities with low days of supply, and drill into orders in the yard with low SKUs. The list goes on.
Acquisitions are also a key part of our strategy in building the industry’s most powerful, end-to-end supply chain visibility platform. In doing so, we look for specific products and great people that can be integrated into the FourKites ecosystem and accelerate our vision for the next three to five years. Again, true integration is paramount here, lest customers wind up with a smorgasbord of siloed platforms that don’t communicate seamlessly.
We acquire companies only after conducting extensive market research and talking at length with many of our customers – and then we begin the work of integrating the acquired companies most valuable features into the FourKites platform.
Our acquisition of leading European supply chain visibility provider NIC-place combined our over-the-road, rail and ocean carrier networks to create the largest multimodal carrier network in Europe. Our successful acquisition of TrackX’s Yard Management, Dock Management and Gate Control solutions served as the foundation for our breakthrough Dynamic Yard solution, which gives enterprises a new ability to proactively manage all of their facilities based on real-time in-yard freight data and analytics. And through our acquisition of Haven, Inc., we integrated advanced document management capabilities, robust collaboration features and support for bookings, with our superior end-to-end real-time tracking to create Dynamic Ocean®.
These integrated capabilities have been extremely well-received by the market. We’ve seen 25% growth in Dynamic Yard customers YoY, with over 200% growth in the number of facilities managed on our platform. Dynamic Ocean, and our overarching ocean business, are thriving as well, with nearly 80% growth in customers YoY, including such renowned brands as Cardinal Health, Arizona Tile, LyondellBasell, McCain Foods, Roehm, Rove Concepts and Yamaha Motors.
This latest release represents a major milestone for a supply chain industry that is rapidly transforming into an ecosystem where stakeholders at every link in the chain work together to predict and prevent the issues that have disrupted our supply chains for far too long. We look forward to continuing to disrupt this market together with our customers by our side.
