FourKites Releases Powerful Automation and Communication Capabilities to Significantly Streamline Warehouse and Distribution Center Deliveries

10-19-23

Latest enhancements to FourKites’ Slot Manager leverage AI, automation and real-time data to connect shippers and hauliers for better exception management, capacity optimisation and productivity improvements

AMSTERDAM — October 19, 2023 — Leading supply chain visibility provider FourKites today announced several new capabilities within its AI-enabled Slot Manager solution that further automate distribution center, warehouse, plant and cross-dock pickup, as well as delivery calendar management, while simplifying communication between shippers, hauliers and drivers.

Nearly 20% of slots are rescheduled each year, resulting in costly and time-consuming delays, additional tasks and major interruptions to daily workflows. By consolidating delivery schedules and haulier communication into one streamlined platform, FourKites’ latest Slot Manager enhancements provide supply chain partners with a more seamless slot management process that saves time, increases on-time performance, improves auditing accuracy, reduces detention fees and slashes dwell times.

“Slot Manager significantly decreases the amount of effort it takes to manage site schedules,” says Florian Schoenle, Team Leader Transport Management at Teva. “With these new capabilities focused on easy communication and increased automation, this solution will drive significant efficiencies and grow top-line revenue.”

The latest updates to FourKites Slot Manager include:

• Automated Rescheduling. Leveraging FourKites’ AI-powered Dynamic ETAs® Slot Manager will automatically reschedule early or late slots as potential exceptions are encountered. This relieves frontline workers from tedious administrative tasks and allows them to focus on managing their daily activities. For hauliers, automated rescheduling eliminates the need to continuously and manually monitor freight for exceptions. Leveraging FourKites AI-powered Dynamic ETAs® and haulier-provided ETAs, as needed, calendars are automatically updated and kept in sync, eliminating time-consuming calls and emails between shippers, haulier and drivers.
• Communication Hub. Now, shippers and hauliers can easily communicate within the Slot Manager tool itself for more efficient operations and faster auditing. Hauliers can invite drivers to manage and collaborate on each slot with a unique URL so that each party can add their own notes and updates, consolidating all communication in a single portal.
• Improved Haulier Access. Through deeper integration with each Haulier’s TMS, shippers can now provide hauliers access to detailed reporting, such as reschedule recommendations, haulier slot compliance, facility metrics and more. This enables a self-service environment for hauliers, streamlines communication and drives continuous improvement with shared metrics and shipper-haulier relationships.

“The chain of communication about time slots between site, driver and hauliers is critical for our business. But it’s often error-prone and slows down processes,” says Dirk Huetter, Chief Project Officer at Huetter Spedition. “FourKites’ Slot Manager offers so much value because it brings these critical stakeholders together in an automated and transparent way. As a result, it creates an efficient, accurate and reliable way to do business while using existing data.”

Slot Manager is the first slot solution to integrate with all major TMS and ERP systems. Hundreds of the world’s leading brands now rely on Slot Manager to slash manual processes and improve their bottom lines. Over the last 12 months, FourKites has seen 65% growth in the number of facilities managed and 247% growth in the number of slots managed in the platform.

“Slot Manager breaks down the silos between systems and teams to significantly reduce slot bottlenecks,” said FourKites Chief Products Officer Priya Rajagopalan. “Now, shippers, hauliers and drivers can all collaborate and communicate within one, integrated, AI-powered slot system that enables greater productivity, agility and efficiency — and, ultimately, better decision-making in real time when exceptions arise.”

Today’s Slot Manager enhancements are the latest innovations that demonstrate how FourKites is applying market-leading AI and machine learning to massive volumes of real-time internal and external supply chain data so supply chain partners can generate insights, identify shocks before they happen, streamline operations and improve the customer experience. Other recent innovations such as Fin AI (FourKites Intelligence Network) and My Workspace are supercharging customers’ real-time decision-making capabilities by leveraging all of the data in the FourKites platform and third-party data sources to provide answers to supply chain questions faster than ever.