Why More Retail Supply Chain Execs Need Freight Shipping Visibility Solutions

In today's global economy, retail supply chain executives must navigate a number of pressing challenges. However, the right freight shipping visibility solutions can significantly mitigate these challenges. To help you determine the solutions your company needs to develop a more reliable and cost-effective supply chain, we'll look at the top challenges facing retail supply chain executives and discuss how they can use freight shipping visibility solutions to overcome them.

Top Challenges Facing Retail Supply Chain Executives

Working as a supply chain executive has never been easy. Faced with rising prices, labor and supply shortages, and growing sources of supply chain disruption, though, succeeding as a retail supply chain executive is now more challenging than ever. Here are some of the top challenges that retail supply chain executives face.

Loss Prevention

According to Packaging Digest, as much as 11% of cargo gets damaged in transit, a substantial expense for many companies. Those that sell perishable or fragile products are especially vulnerable to losses due to damaged freight. An effective loss-prevention strategy for these companies is a vital yet challenging element of supply chain management.

Forecasting and Inventory Management

Forecasting product demand to execute an optimized inventory management strategy requires retail supply chain executives to understand what is flowing through their supply chain in real-time. As supply chains become increasingly complex, though, this becomes more and more difficult to do.

Cost Reduction

With prices rising across the board, the need for cost reduction weighs heavily on the mind of almost every retail supply chain manager. It's more expensive than ever to purchase and ship products; therefore, optimizing a supply chain for cost-effectiveness becomes even more vital.

Supply Chain Disruptions

Today, supply chain disruptions can come in a variety of forms. Any retail supply chain manager who had the misfortune of seeing their supply chain through the height of the COVID-19 pandemic knows just how sudden, unpredictable, and destructive supply chain disruption can be. Even as the pandemic is winding down, though, its impact on global supply chains is not. Labor shortages created by the pandemic have made it especially challenging for retailers to avoid supply chain disruption, and there's no predicting the next source of trouble.

What Does Visibility Mean for Retail Supply Chain Management?

Before diving into how supply chain visibility can solve the challenges outlined above, it is first important to define what visibility means for retail supply chain managers. In the most basic sense, visibility means the ability to track the location of your products throughout your supply chain. For many companies, visibility also means tracking shipment conditions and ensuring that shipments don't incur any damage in transit. Supply chain visibility can also mean visibility into shipping processes, creating more transparent processes and making it easier for supply chain managers to understand what's happening within their supply chain.

The Benefits of Freight Shipping Visibility Solutions

Now that we've defined what visibility means for retail supply chain managers, let's consider the benefits that freight shipping visibility solutions offer and the challenges that they help retail overcome.

For starters, demand forecasting and inventory management become much more straightforward when supply chain executives can accurately determine when their purchase orders will arrive. By tracking the location and condition of shipments in real-time, a freight shipping visibility solution such as Tive can vastly improve a company's inventory management processes.

Shipment condition visibility solutions, meanwhile, can go a long way toward assisting with a loss-prevention strategy. Along with helping companies pinpoint damaged products and ensure they don't make it into customers’ hands, real-time shipment condition trackers also enable supply chain managers to determine common sources of damage and develop solutions to mitigate them.

Loss prevention, of course, plays an essential role in cost reduction. Along with cutting costs by reducing damage rates, supply chain visibility solutions also enable executives to more efficiently analyze their supply chain to determine areas of inefficiency where there is room for further cost reduction.

Lastly, freight shipping visibility solutions help retail supply chain managers avoid disruption by quickly alerting them when exceptions occur and enabling them to create a more transparent and agile supply chain that makes it easier to pivot to alternative solutions when disruption happens. Retailers who can do that retain more customers.  

How Tive's Hyper-Accurate Trackers Provide Complete Freight Shipping Visibility

Tive's industry-leading hyper-accurate location and condition trackers allow retail supply chain managers to track their shipments’ location and conditions in real-time. Along with providing timely and accurate updates about when cargo will arrive, Tive's trackers also enable companies to monitor temperature, humidity, light exposure, and shock absorption.

By providing complete real-time visibility into cargo's location and conditions, Tive helps retail supply chain managers solve many of their most complex challenges, including loss prevention, cost reduction, and inventory management.

Retail Supply Chain Leaders, Tackle Your Toughest Challenges with Tive’s Freight Shipping Visibility

As the challenges faced by today's retail supply chain executives grow increasingly more pressing, the silver lining is that freight shipping visibility solutions are getting better and better at solving these challenges. If you want to learn more about Tive's trackers can help your retail company achieve complete transportation visibility, contact us today!