Last week, FourKites announced a secure and scalable GPS onboarding solution that we’re calling Partner Hub. You can get all the details in our press release, but in short, Partner Hub is the industry’s first ELD onboarding solution that fully addresses brokers’ and carriers’ needs for total transparency, advanced security and user controls.
As with all of our solutions, we built Partner Hub in close collaboration with our target customers – in this case, the brokers and carriers without whom a real-time visibility network simply cannot exist. Their detailed input and consultation were indispensable in helping us engineer a solution that is not only robust in its functionality, but critically, is also one they can trust.
After all, the real-time supply chain visibility movement, like any other commercial endeavor, depends upon trust between parties. And carriers and brokers have very understandable and legitimate concerns about sharing their data.
It is a simple matter of fact that ELDs capture more than just location. They capture hours of service, fuel consumption, driving patterns and more. It’s sensitive stuff. Carriers, in particular, want to know what exactly is being tracked? Who has access? Is my data being sold? Is it being used to manipulate pricing? Is the underlying platform itself scalable and secure? (The recent outage at truckstop.com is just the latest incident to highlight concerns around system reliability and security.)
Over and over again, our carrier customers made it clear – in building a dedicated ELD onboarding tool, ours would need to tackle these overriding concerns. In other words, trust needed to be built in. Here’s how we did just that.
Partner Hub is highly secure. FourKites customer data is kept behind a secure firewall. FourKites complies with all GDPR (Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation) requirements to safeguard personal data and privacy. In addition, FourKites is the only visibility provider that is SOC 2 certified, which means we undergo an annual, independent audit to ensure that we are managing customer data based on the five principles of security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality and privacy.
Carriers have total visibility and control. Carriers create their own secure log-ins to Partner Hub. They have complete visibility into the assets being tracked – now and in the past – and by whom. They decide whether to share data, and they can shut it off at any time. All of this is available to carriers within one central dashboard within Partner Hub. And for the record – FourKites never shares ELD credentials with brokers, shippers or any third parties. And we do not, and never will, sell network data.
We’ve made no secret of the fact that as we built FourKites, we prioritized building the world’s largest network of global shippers (which at 380+ and counting, as of today, far outpaces every other visibility provider on the market many times over). That strategy has paid off in terms of achieving critical mass and generating the kind of visibility data that is of value to all stakeholders in our network. Having laid that solid foundation, our customers of today – and going forward – represent the complete spectrum of supply chain stakeholders: shippers, brokers and carriers. The success of our platform depends upon transparency and collaboration between all three of these ecosystem partners, and our goal as a company is to build solutions tailored to address the needs of each.
The success of our platform depends upon transparency and collaboration between all three of these ecosystem partners, and our goal as a company is to build solutions tailored to address the needs of each.
Everyone in the supply chain ecosystem should reap the substantial operational and business benefits of predictive, real-time visibility data. Partner Hub is just the most recent example of how we are working in close collaboration with all of our ecosystem partners to ensure that they can do just that – with transparency, advanced security and user controls.
In other words, with trust built into every layer.
Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me or [email protected] with any questions or feedback about our latest solution.
