Freight Tracking in USA – Key Benefits, Challenges, and Solutions

The demand for real-time information on shipment status and greater visibility over shipment movements is growing unprecedentedly. Every component in the logistics ecosystem, right from the manufacturer to the end customer, seeks real-time tracking information, and the majority of this demand stems from the fact that it is beneficial as well. Having real-time visibility over freight movements not only offers greater control to businesses but also empowers them with reliable insights to plan for subsequent logistics movements. 

While the USA has an excellent freight market, which is only expected to grow owing to the rise in eCommerce, B2C commerce, and cross-border trade, the majority of businesses/shippers keep struggling with poor status reporting. Apart from disrupting the delivery SLAs, it affects the overall logistics planning, leading to increased logistics costs. Also, freight forwarders and retailers often use legacy freight management solutions that make it hard to manage cross-border freight efficiently and gain granular visibility.

All this affects the overall logistics efficiency and degrades end customer experience, which ultimately leads to losses for retailers/shippers/businesses.

This is where freight tracking comes into the picture. 

Here, we discuss how businesses can benefit from freight tracking in USA, the amazing benefits they can unlock with real-time freight tracking, and what are some daunting challenges they face to do this with manually managed systems.

How Can Freight Tracking in USA Help Businesses and Freight Forwarders?

Freight tracking in the USA can greatly benefit businesses and freight forwarders by providing increased visibility and transparency in the supply chain, leading to improved operational efficiency, customer satisfaction, and cost savings.

Having real-time visibility into the goods movement enables the stakeholders to track shipments, monitor their progress, and proactively address any delays or disruptions, leading to better decision-making and more effective supply chain management. By having access to accurate and up-to-date information, businesses can optimize inventory levels, manage production schedules, and coordinate with partners and customers more efficiently, resulting in cost savings.

They can share real-time tracking updates with end customers and trigger automated notifications for status reporting and dynamic ETAs, improving overall customer experience. Accurate and timely updates on the shipment status help build trust and confidence in the customers. They also help businesses plan their operations as per the latest shipment status and have visibility into potential delays, allowing them to manage their inventory levels and production schedules more effectively. 

This ability to proactively identify any delays, disruptions, or inefficiencies and take corrective actions in a timely manner helps businesses plan for disruptions in an efficient manner and reduce the logistics costs incurred due to poor planning. This can include rerouting shipments, optimizing transportation routes, or addressing issues at ports or customs. 

Let’s have a quick look at some freight tracking challenges businesses face while using manually managed or legacy systems. 

Freight Tracking in USA – Challenges 

#1 – Lack of Unified Reporting

Manually managed systems restrict businesses and supply chain professionals from getting a comprehensive view of the entire supply chain. All the logistical components are disparate and work in a siloed manner. This means that businesses end up having disjoint information and have to individually contact every service provider for the latest updates on shipment movements. 

This inability to have unified shipment status reports leads to poor logistical planning, such as 3PL booking, shipment collection, customs navigation, and more. All in all, businesses might end up paying for resources that go unused owing to delayed or early arrivals.

#2 – Lack of Standardized Status Reporting

Another major challenge faced by businesses for freight tracking in USA is the lack of standardized reporting. Thus, every event might reflect in different wordings across multiple parties, such as a simple event like “shipment pickup” can be represented as – pickup done, pickup completed, shipment picked up, order picked, the driver picked up the shipment, and so on. 

As every party is using different terminologies and there is no standard format for various shipment status milestones, it becomes impossible to have a central interface for effortless freight management and automating the status reporting.

#3 – Poor Transparency Because of Manual Tracking

Manual tracking is a tedious and error-prone process that limits businesses from realizing the full potential of having shipment status updates. Manual tracking involves tracking individual shipments with multiple parties, one at a time. Thus, having the right information about shipment movement status might be highly subjective, depending on the information provided by the service providers.

This can result in delays due to multiple checks taking place at different locations. This also means that by the time a retailer or manufacturer gets the tracking information, it might no longer be correct. This affects accuracy and transparency.

#4 – Inability to Convey Dynamic ETAs to the Customer

The inability to have real-time freight tracking in US makes it impossible for businesses to share dynamic ETAs with their end customers. Further, any shipment delays affect the promised ETA SLAs, and customers tend to lose trust in the business. This also leads to an increased number of customer query calls, and as the businesses themselves lack a reliable status update, they might fail to resolve these queries efficiently.

#5 – Additional Costs Due to Demurrage and Detention

Manual freight tracking can lead to higher incidental costs as businesses might fail to get timely updates on shipment movements. Likewise, delayed shipment pickups from the final port or airport lead to higher detention and demurrage fees. These costs are a total loss for them and can also lead to higher last mile costs owing to poor logistics planning from the ports, etc.

Benefits of Real-Time Freight Tracking in USA

#1 – Real-Time Shipment Location Updates

With intelligent solutions for freight tracking in USA, businesses can get instant access to real-time shipment locations and can get automated updates for shipment movements. This not only helps avoid costly delivery delays and logistics planning eros, but it also helps get better visibility across the entire supply chain.

These solutions offer standardized ETAs and standard movement information across multiple carriers and service providers via a centralized dashboard. This helps manage shipment movements throughout the supply chain, right from the origin to the destination, in a highly efficient manner.

#2 – Plan for Incidental Costs

Automated freight tracking and management platforms can help businesses plan for incidental costs like demurrage and detention. These solutions offer predictive alerts for shipments that are most likely to get delayed, which enables businesses to plan the subsequent logistics movements accordingly. 

As businesses can plan ahead of time, they can take several precautionary measures, minimize logistics transportation costs and convey the same information to all the relevant parties in real-time.

Real-time shipment tracking solutions also offer detailed reports that help in checking which truck/vehicle has been responsible for the most delays/disruptions, which helps improve logistics planning in the future.

#3 – Dynamic ETAs 

With real-time information, the software for freight tracking in USA helps businesses to share dynamic ETAs with the end customers and find out exactly when their orders would be delivered. Also, in case of unexpected changes or delays along the way, they are always aware of the situation, which helps reduce query calls and prevents the overall CX degradation.

#4 – Increased On-Time Deliveries via Real-Time Planning

With granular insights into the key milestone events, businesses can plan for the forthcoming journey events in an efficient and smart manner. For example, for a shipment that is vulnerable to delays, businesses can opt for a Last Mile service provider which offers quick or superfast deliveries. This helps to increase the on-time deliveries and keep the overall costs of delivery minimal by reducing the loss incurred due to delayed arrival.

Shipsy – Best Solution for Freight Tracking in USA

Shipsy is an AI-powered end-to-end logistics automation and supply chain management platform that offers offer excellent freight management and real-time tracking solutions for businesses of all types and all scales. The solution offers real-time view of all the shipments across international and domestic carriers via a single dashboard for unified management and consolidated insights.

The solution offers consolidated tracking across 50+ shipping lines and 110+ 3PLs in real-time, which eliminates the need for individual shipment tracking and dependency on intermediaries for shipment status updates. Further, the solution also triggers automated notifications to multiple stakeholders for shipment status updates and notifications and helps businesses unlock:

• 36% decrease in ETA SLA breach
• 64% increase in Customer Satisfaction
• 26% increase in delivery NPS

To get started with Shipsy’s smart freight tracking in USA, or to know more, please schedule a custom demo here with our experts!