August 2023 product roundup: Air freight tracking and ocean transshipments

This month, we’ve taken a big leap towards providing a single source of truth for all your supply chain visibility data with the launch of air freight tracking and ocean transshipments, along with enhancements to labelling and reporting. 

Keep reading for a full rundown on the latest additions to the Beacon platform…

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Introducing air freight tracking ✈️

With the launch of air freight tracking, the Beacon platform is officially multi-modal! 

The platform is now connected to over 166 airlines, enabling you to receive real-time tracking updates for air shipments in your dashboard. 

Entering an air waybill is all you need to get started. For the major airlines, tracking data will be populated within a minute. For shipments with smaller carriers, initial data may take several hours to come through. 

The transportation milestones reported in your dashboard will vary by airline, but typically include a combination of:

• Booking confirmation at origin
• Awaiting loading
• Loaded
• Departure at origin (estimated and actual) 
• Arrival at destination (estimated and actual) 
• Offloaded status
• Delivery/collection status

As with ocean shipments, air cargo tracking data will feed into a suite of analytics tools and reports designed to help you improve supply chain planning and operate more efficiently. The following reports will become avaiable for air shipments over the next couple of weeks:

• Volume: insights into the distribution of your air freight by route, time period and carrier
• Timing & Delays: compare actual and estimated travel times across routes and carriers
• Risk Concentration: understand how well you are spreading risk across routes and carriers
• Carbon Emissions: put metrics around the environmental footprint of air freight

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Improved visibility into ocean transshipments 🚢

Wondering if the latest strike or weather event has affected the movement of your goods? 

Transshipments are a common cause of data dark spots. 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. 

We’ve introduced support for ocean transshipments so you can have complete visibility into the movement of your containers through intermediary ports. 

With transshipment support, you’re now able to: 

• Filter by direct or indirect status and transshipment port 
• Identify the number of transshipment ports a container is stopping at
• See when a container is arriving, waiting to be loaded and departing intermediary ports

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Add labels in bulk

Labels allow you to categorise shipments based on any associated characteristic. Common uses include grouping shipments based on merchandise category, the haulier responsible for collection, the destination warehouse or the associated end customer. With our latest platform update, labels can now be added to shipments in bulk via CSV upload.

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Interested in learning more about Beacon? Get in touch with one of our experts.