Tive’s 2025 State of Visibility Report: Key Insights for Supply Chain Professionals

Your competitors can see their shipments in real time. Can you?

While you’re crafting another apologetic email about “unexpected delays,” your rivals are watching their supply chains like hawks through digital dashboards—and stealing your customers one visibility breakthrough at a time.

The Tive State of Visibility 2025 report lays bare the brutal truth: companies clinging to legacy tracking methods are dying—and they don’t even know it yet. And all while, the gulf between leaders and laggards grows daily. 

The cold truth? Your supply chain is either visible or vulnerable, and we’re about to dig into five key insights from the report that add context and substance to this thesis.   

1. The Rise of Real-Time Visibility: Adoption Trends & Key Technologies 

Responses like, “Your shipment will arrive sometime between Tuesday and never” no longer cut it. 

Look at the numbers: IoT shipment tracking jumped from 55% to 60% in 12 months. Even more telling? IoT-based cargo tracking skyrocketed by 200% as companies finally ditched their clipboards and spreadsheets.

What’s happening on loading docks and in warehouses adds even more substance to the story. Companies want answers to basic questions: Which carriers deliver on time? (39% monitor this religiously.) Where do shipments get stuck? (29% track dwell time.) Which routes work? (28% benchmark every path.)

Meanwhile, AI for predictive analytics grew from 35% to 45% because knowing where your stuff was yesterday won’t work in 2025. Customers want to know where it is now and when—exactly when—it will arrive.

The cold truth: if you can’t see your supply chain in real time, your competitors can—and they’re stealing your customers while you make excuses about “unexpected delays.”

2. Barriers to Visibility: What’s Holding Businesses Back? 

If you have had a visibility project stall recently, follow the money.

Nearly half of companies (48%) cited cost concerns as their biggest roadblock. Another 37% couldn’t convince their CFO about the ROI. “We know it’s important, but how do I justify the expense?” Sounds familiar, right?

The tech headaches run deep: 30% of companies struggle to connect visibility tools with those ancient legacy systems nobody wants to replace. Another 25% lack the in-house talent to implement and manage these technologies. Meanwhile, 20% don’t trust their own data accuracy—garbage in, garbage out.

Company size also contributes to the struggle. Midsize businesses (101-500 employees) get squeezed hardest by budget constraints—because they’re too big to ignore visibility but too small for enterprise-level investment. Meanwhile, big players drown in complexity, trying to scale solutions across dozens of countries and hundreds of suppliers.

The brutal reality? Companies cutting corners on staff training might save money today—but they’re likely to hemorrhage customers tomorrow when their teams can’t deliver the visibility offered by their competitors.

Success requires three commitments: investing in scalable tech that grows with you, developing internal expertise, and getting serious about data quality. The rest is just expensive window dressing.

3. Visibility is Driving Green Supply Chains 

While you’re figuring out visibility basics, your competitors are already using these same tools to go green—and customers notice.

The numbers don’t lie: 43% of companies leverage visibility tech to slash fuel consumption. Another 42% optimize delivery routes to cut miles and emissions, while 35% track carbon footprints with the same precision they track packages. Smart players (35%) even use these tools to implement circular economy practices that reduce waste.

Why the green rush? Money talks. Market demand and tightening regulations force action—not just good intentions. Companies caught without emissions data face penalties, lost contracts, and public relations nightmares.

The link between visibility and sustainability couldn’t be clearer: 83% of supply chain leaders rate real-time tracking as “moderately to extremely important” for their green initiatives. When you can see your supply chain, you can clean it up.

And beyond doing their part to save the planet, companies that track emissions and waste also do wonders for their reputation. Customers increasingly choose partners who prove their green credentials with hard data, not marketing fluff.

The equation is simple: No visibility = no sustainability = no competitive edge. Your eco-friendly claims mean nothing without numbers to back them up.

4. The Changing Role of Visibility in Risk & Loss Prevention

That loud thud you heard wasn’t your shipment falling off a truck—it was the sound of companies dropping millions on preventable losses.

Security concerns now drive 59% of visibility investments—more than any other factor. Yet 45% of companies still discover cargo damage only after delivery, when it’s too late to do anything but apologize and pay up.

The communication gap is staggering too. While phone-based tracking dropped 30% in 2025 (thank goodness), too many businesses cling to reactive methods instead of embracing automated alerts. Cargo theft flourishes in this information vacuum, targeting shipments that lack real-time monitoring.

“Did our shipment arrive?” has become “Why didn’t you warn us about the delay?” Companies providing proactive updates build trust, while those caught by surprise lose credibility—and customers.

The difference between leaders and laggards comes down to timing. Top performers catch problems mid-route—and can take immediate action. Everyone else writes apology emails and processes claims.

Your choice is simple: invest in real-time shipment visibility to prevent losses—or keep funding your growing damage claims budget. Smart companies have already made their call.

5. Data Collaboration: From Data Silos to Shared Intelligence

Your supply chain data sits locked in a vault while your competitors swap insights like baseball cards—and win because of it.

Data sharing has become the new competitive advantage, with 63% of businesses already sharing information with partners or actively planning to. Companies using EXW or DDP contracts see the biggest gains when they tear down these data walls. Meanwhile, the holdouts watch their margins shrink.

Geography shapes priorities dramatically. North American companies obsess over real-time shipment tracking (90%), Europeans fixate on sustainability metrics (85%), and APAC regions demand cost efficiency and scalability (80%). One size fits nobody.

Industries have carved their own paths, too. Retail and logistics sectors push IoT adoption rates to 80%, while pharma companies spend big on compliance and temperature monitoring (95%)—because one undetected temperature spike can transform medicine into expensive garbage.

The outdated mentality of “my data stays mine” died with clipboards and fax machines. Today’s winners build collaborative ecosystems where information flows as smoothly as their shipments—customized to their industry, region, and specific risk profile. 

See It or Suffer: Why Visibility is No Longer Optional

The State of Visibility 2025 report confirms what many have been trying to say for years: supply chain visibility has moved from “nice feature” to “survival requirement”—and companies using visibility tech feast on the market share of businesses still playing hide-and-seek with their shipments. Sure, connecting new systems to your ERP is painful. Yes, the CFO may faint at the price paid for this insight. But what costs more: visibility tools or watching your competitors poach your best customers? The truth hurts: in today’s market, invisible supply chains die—usually slowly, painfully, and with lots of customer complaint emails along the way.

At Tive, we have solutions to bring these key visibility insights to life. Our Solo 5G and Solo Lite trackers show exactly where your shipments are and what condition they’re in—temperature spikes, drops, tilts, and all. Tive Tag gives you affordable temperature monitoring, proving your products stayed perfect while in transit. Our intuitive cloud platform cuts through data noise to show you what matters: which routes work, which carriers don’t, and where your stuff keeps getting stuck. And most importantly, we’re industry agnostic: we cover everything from pharmaceuticals to fresh produce to high-value shipments—all backed by a live monitoring team that spots problems, and stops them before they become disasters. 

So, take the first step. Download the full report and get started with Tive today.

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