Food & Beverage Companies Increasingly Turn to FourKites For Real-Time Supply Chain Visibility

FourKites, the #1 real-time supply chain visibility platform, shared details about its momentum with the world’s leading F&B companies, who are increasingly leveraging FourKites’ superior network of logistics tracking data and proprietary machine learning technology to deliver essential products faster and more efficiently to their final destinations – even as COVID-19 sparked massive supply chain disruptions.

As of today, 18 of the top-20 global F&B companies – including Conagra, Coca-Cola, AB InBev, Constellation Brands, C&S Wholesale Grocers, Nestlé, Sysco, General Mills, Tyson Foods, Kraft Heinz, US Foods, Smithfield, Land O’Lakes, Cargill and Ferrero – rely on FourKites for data-driven insights and proactive risk management of their food and beverage shipments. In the last 12 months, F&B leaders have increasingly turned to FourKites for end-to-end supply chain visibility, with the platform having seen total F&B shipper customer growth of 23 percent; F&B carrier growth of 20 percent; and load count growth of nearly 50 percent.

By identifying late loads with high levels of precision and accuracy, FourKites’ F&B customers have been able to achieve significant improvements in cycle times for their sensitive freight. In the last year, FourKites’ F&B shippers increased on-time performance of their freight by 8 percent, while dwell time decreased by 7.5 percent, despite the significant challenges presented in recent months by COVID-19-related supply chain disruptions.

According to Gartner, “Many companies lack visibility of their shipments in transit. This lack of visibility results in instability, unpredictability, delays and poor customer service. Real-time transportation visibility platforms (RTTVPs) are growing rapidly in popularity and use in business today. These solutions provide real time visibility and alerts to customers for shipments in transit. Letting customers know where their freight is and when it will be delivered to them has become a key requirement from customers and consumers alike.”

Over the past 12 months, FourKites has introduced many industry-first innovations specifically designed for – and often in collaboration with – its F&B shipper and carrier customers, including:

● Secure Shipments that alert users to avoid areas that may pose a threat to product quality – for example, high altitude areas where packaging may be damaged due to decreased air pressure. One Fortune 500 F&B customer commented that this new capability is a game changer for them and their carriers: “Our team has been able to set up zones to proactively alert when a carrier begins heading toward a trouble spot so that we have time to react and get the truck turned around before we end up with damaged product.”
● Industry-first, machine learning-driven Dynamic ETAs for LTL, which deliver unprecedented accuracy in LTL tracking and enable shippers to take greater advantage of a more cost-effective mode of freight transport and expedited shipment of essential freight. “The ability to proactively manage exceptions for LTL shipments means better planning, smoother operations and improved visibility for customers,” said Dustin Braun, Senior Director - Logistics, Land O’Lakes. “Predicting accurate arrival times for LTL loads has always been one of the harder problems in supply chain. This is a genuine breakthrough in real-time visibility, and we are happy to have collaborated with FourKites to help make this innovation happen.”
● End-to-end cold chain visibility, as illustrated by this partnership with Frozen Food Express
● Network Visibility, enabling for the first time visibility into pre-paid shipments to improve planning and inventory management. Over the last couple months, FourKites has increased the number of retailers relying on FourKites by 3x to help them through this challenging time, and has increased load sharing and collaboration by 6x during the COVID crisis.
● A slew of new features to improve the safety and productivity of frontline F&B workers, including paperless document processing, enhanced notifications and messaging capabilities, and tracking for direct store deliveries and merchandisers. “With FourKites’ Merchandiser solutions, we now have visibility into the last mile of our supply chain – from our warehouses to our retailers – instead of relying on a printed route plan that does not update as delivery sequences change,” said Brett Frankenberg, SVP, Product Supply Planning & Bottle Sales at Coke Consolidated. “FourKites is creating visibility of the physical via digital, and facilitating better frontline decisions.”
● A live Network Congestion Map that provides ocean import/export dwell times for over 230 ports worldwide and US city-level dwell and load volume analytics. Senior Product Manager Sergiy Yablonsky of Nestle stated, “I am super grateful to FourKites for delivering a tool to monitor border crossing times! It is immensely helpful to understand the impact of COVID-19 on the supply chain networks.”

The last year of innovation and momentum has translated into tangible improvements to key operational metrics for FourKites’ F&B customers. Smithfield’s on-time delivery rate increased from 87 percent to 94 percent thanks to FourKites’ predictive supply chain visibility. And C&S Wholesale’s customer service teams reported a 65 percent decrease in check calls in just three months after implementing the platform.

“This last year has been a time of unprecedented challenges, but also of unprecedented progress for the logistics community,” said FourKites CEO Mathew Elenjickal. “Even during this very trying time, our team has been able to work collaboratively with our F&B customers to achieve significant improvements in not only the transport and delivery of essential goods, but also to solve some of the longest-standing issues in supply chain, including dwell time, inventory management, overreliance on paper-based processes and unreliability of LTL shipments."