Skip to Main Content

It takes vision, execution and close collaboration with customers to solve the world’s toughest supply chain issues

Industry analyst firm Gartner has released its second annual Magic Quadrant (MQ) report for Real-Time Transportation Visibility Platforms, and FourKites once again was the company positioned in the Leaders quadrant with the highest Completeness of Vision.

In addition, Gartner issued a first-ever companion report, “Critical Capabilities for Real-Time Transportation Visibility Platforms,” which the firm describes as “providing deeper insight into providers’ product and service offerings by extending the Magic Quadrant analysis.” In the CC report, which stack ranks vendors against each other to provide readers with a better picture of a provider’s product and service offerings and critical differentiators, FourKites was the clear-cut leader:

  • “FourKites scored the top score overall among all the vendors in this research”
  • “Its capability scores for all capabilities were above average,” and
  • FourKites was ranked #1 in three of the five most complex use cases, clearly highlighting our dominant position as the provider of choice for enterprise companies.

I’m proud that FourKites continues to be widely regarded as the preeminent visionary in our space, and I’d like to thank all of our employees, partners and customers for everything they do to make FourKites stand out in the market. These reports paint a clear picture of FourKites as the solution for global enterprise companies.

I think a key reason we continue to re-earn our leadership position is because we remain on the frontier, setting the pace for innovative new technologies and novel ways to apply them to transform supply chains.

For example, when we began working with Smithfield Foods, we were still in the infancy of a market we’d created in 2014 with the introduction of the world’s first real-time transportation visibility platform. Our first order of business, as with so many customers then, was to solve the “where’s my truck” problem that had Smithfield’s track-and-trace team trapped in an endless cycle of reactive customer support calls. Our implementation improved Smithfield’s on-time delivery rate from 87% to 94%, and our predictive ETAs helped the track-and-trace team flip the model to proactive customer service.

And so we went on to unlock the next opportunity, and the one after that, and the one after that. By analyzing aggregated platform data, Smithfield was able to identify and prioritize its best-performing supply chain partners. We connected warehouse and dock operations to optimize operational efficiencies. Smithfield extended its use of FourKites beyond over-the-road location tracking to new modes such as ocean and new use cases, including real-time temperature tracking to ensure the quality of perishable goods.

Today, fully half of FourKites customers are using real-time visibility, predictive analytics and automation to connect the physical world of warehouses, stores and distribution centers to gain visibility into orders end-to-end. We’re tapping data from siloed systems and connecting more supply chain partners to accelerate collaborative analysis and insights. We’re bringing real-time visibility and predictive automation to supply planning, demand monitoring, procurement and much more.

As I’ve noted before, community-driven innovation has been central to FourKites’ winning model. Over the years, our customers have provided hundreds of ideas that later manifested as new platform innovations; in 2021 alone, that number totalled 185. In many cases, our customers co-developed and beta-tested the capabilities in lockstep with us, ensuring that our solutions delivered exactly what they needed.

In the last year, we doubled down on this winning model, relaunching our customer advisory board with a slate of new members, creating a new Innovation Partner program with some of the world’s leading brands, and hiring a team of experts to build more industry-specific solutions that solve more of our customers’ unique pain points.

One of our more recent innovations, Order Intelligence Suite, provides a single-pane-of-glass view of the entire lifecycle of every order, so users across functions can eliminate inefficiencies, manage exceptions, reduce expenses and increase customer satisfaction at every step of an order’s journey.

Simply put, our customers are the driving force behind FourKites’ unrivaled pace of innovation and our position as the company best able to solve their most complex supply chain issues. And while a Gartner accolade is just one piece of the puzzle, the most rewarding validation for these claims come from our customers themselves.

I know we’re on the right track when Tom Morton at Eastman calls out our “willingness to adapt” and “a well-articulated global visibility strategy.” Mari Roberts at Frito-Lay recently said, “FourKites has been a great partner and continues to expand functionality based on the needs of both shippers and carriers. We appreciate FourKites’ innovative and collaborative culture”

And nothing better sums up our ability to serve the complex needs of global customers than feedback from Ferenc Polgar at Bayer, “After we had an unsuccessful implementation with another visibility provider, we kicked off the project with FourKites. It’s been very good — very promising compared to where we were in the past. We’re seeing 94% of our shipments tracking, which is very, very impressive. The Bayer-FourKites connection is established in Thailand, in the Philippines, in Mexico and for our global business across North America and Europe.”

We are very excited about these results as they highlight our unmatched ability to serve the world’s largest enterprises. We enjoy an incredible position of strength relative to our competition, but we take nothing for granted. We understand there’s no magic formula to industry leadership, and so we will continue to learn, to improve, and to execute, with customer-driven innovation at the core.


Want to learn more? Download the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Real-Time Transportation Visibility Platforms and 2022 Critical Capabilities for Real-Time Transportation Visibility Platforms reports.

Stay Informed

Join 30,000+ monthly readers and get exclusive ebooks, reports, and industry insights from FourKites every week.

Read our Privacy Policy