Beacon is a supply chain visibility platform.

We began life as a digital freight forwarder. During that time we repeatedly saw the same customer problems come up again; no matter how good their forwarders were, customers had little visibility of their shipments, and managing data across multiple forwarders and carriers was painful and inefficient. We saw first-hand how all of this resulted in real business impact, particularly during the Suez Canal crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath. 

So we came up with a solution.

Common supply chain problems can lead to poor decisions:

A lack of visibility and knowledge about your supply chain.
According to a recent survey¹ more than half of businesses feel they don’t have enough visibility over their supply chains. They don’t know the status of items moving through those supply chains and as a result, when things change they don’t know what the knock-on effects will be. They might know their supply chains are inefficient, but they don’t know how or where to start fixing things. 

Supply chain visibility means knowing the status of events as they happen, why things went wrong (if they did), how to minimise their impact, and what can be done next time to avoid the same things happening again².

Decision making is based on instinct instead of information.
Without supply chain visibility³ businesses operate on guesswork; they’re reactive and run on instinct, making big decisions without the data or insights to back them up. Procurement and buying teams don’t have the information needed to order inventory at the right time, finance managers might struggle to manage cash flow, and the end customer suffers by receiving goods later than expected, experiencing stock outs or inadequate communication. A recent report found that real-time visibility can reduce delay-related expenses by up to 60%⁴. 

Our take on the solution:

Beacon’s vision is to empower businesses by connecting their supply chain data.
We provide the tools that businesses need to make the right decisions quickly, and access to capital required for growth.

Connecting supply chains and contextualising them.
At Beacon, we believe that supply chains are disconnected data problems; their information is fragmented and always changing, it’s spread across various ERP systems and documents. Though scattered, supply chain data can be incredibly useful, so we use technology to harness it; connecting the documents and milestones, and combining them with third party sources for greater context. We create a comprehensive picture, playing customer and industry information back to them in a way that’s easy to act on.

Creating tools that are simple and accessible to everyone.
Our platform is intuitive to use, and works for businesses big or small. Our goal is to remove uncertainty, opacity and excess effort from supply chains. We want to enable businesses to focus on what they do best – designing and selling great products their customers want.