Beacon, the supply chain visibility platform, has added air freight tracking and ocean transshipments to its suite of products, taking it closer to its goal of providing a single source of truth for all of its customers’ supply chain data.
Launch of air freight tracking
Fetching tracking updates can be a costly, time-intensive task with supply chain operators required to log into a multitude of carrier portals and manually log milestones and ETAs in spreadsheets. With the launch of air freight tracking alongside existing ocean tracking capabilities, Beacon now enables effortless multi-modal tracking in a single platform.
With connections to over 166 air carriers, Beacon customers can now receive real-time tracking updates for air shipments directly via their Beacon dashboard or in existing systems via API connection. Customers need only enter an air waybill to get started, with tracking data for most major air carriers being populated within a minute.
The key tracking milestones reported typically include:
- Booking confirmation at origin
- Awaiting loading
- Loaded
- Departure at origin (estimated and actual)
- Arrival at destination (estimated and actual)
- Offloaded status
- Delivery/collection status
Tracking data will then be refreshed on average every hour and customers can set departure notifications to be alerted when their cargo is taking off.
Improved visibility into ocean transshipments
Ocean transshipments are a common dark spot when it comes to transportation visibility. Not knowing which shipments are stopping at intermediary ports or the routes being travelled can catch supply chain and logistics teams by surprise and inhibit their ability to efficiently manage disruptions.
To solve this problem, Beacon has bolstered its ocean freight tracking offering to include ocean transshipments so customers can have complete visibility into the movement of their containers through intermediary ports.
With transshipment support, customers are now able to:
- Filter by direct or indirect status and transshipment port
- Identify the number of transshipment ports at which a container is stopping
- See when a container is arriving at intermediary ports, waiting to be loaded, and departing
Fraser Robinson, CEO of Beacon, commented: “The launch of air freight tracking marks a significant milestone for Beacon, expanding our modal coverage to help our customers gain greater visibility into their supply chains so they can improve reliability, reduce costs and identify inefficiencies.
We’re also delighted that we can now provide our customers with more oversight of their ocean transshipments, which are historically a common cause of data dark spots. We know that a lack of visibility into which containers are making stops along their journey – and where they’re stopping – can introduce an additional element of supply chain risk that needs to be managed.”
