Supply chain visibility has always been important, and it will remain top of mind for shippers, says Peter Weis, chief information officer and senior vice president of supply chain at ITS Logistics.

While visibility has been a topic of discussion in supply chain circles for decades, the root issues that cause visibility problems have never been solved, Weis says. 

“In fact, some of the same tools, like electronic data interchange or uploading Excel spreadsheets, that were introduced in the ‘90s still exist today,” he says.

“There has been some progress,” Weis says. “You have open APIs [application programming interfaces], website scraping, AI and other tools that have made some incremental improvements in visibility. Some new tech players have moved the ball forward, but the underlying issue is there really isn't an economic incentive for companies to cooperate and start sharing information on some standard or format that everybody could share.”

Absent a trusted global data ecosystem, a purely competitive marketplace exists, making for a largely zero-sum game with winners and losers, he says. “You've got a collision of three different kinds of entrants: traditional 3PLs [third-party logistics providers] with deep pockets, good operations, good skills and good customer bases; but they've been too slow to innovate in this area. That's created an opening for the pure tech players that don't know the business as well, but build shiny technology that’s alluring to customers but doesn't fulfill the promise of visibility. Then you've had a sort of hybrid, the ‘super-tech-forward’ 3PLs that have spent probably 10 times more than other providers to solve the problem, but they don't know the business either. As a result, they've ended up largely being expensive disappointments.

“That's the marketplace collision going on,” Weis says. “My money is on the deep-pocket 3PLs to get their act together in the next few years.”