March 2024 product roundup: Custom notifications, sailing schedules and simplified sharing

This month, we're excited to introduce a host of new features and improvements. From customizable notifications, to point-to-point sailing schedules, and an enhanced API that supports seamless integration with your systems, we've got you covered. Plus, we've made Live Board sharing easier and provided improved transparency into your tracking credits. 

Keep reading for the full rundown of what’s new in Beacon…

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Custom notifications

Custom ETA change and shipment milestone notifications give you the flexibility to define the conditions under which you want to receive alerts, helping to improve exception management in the process. 

Instead of receiving daily updates for all shipments being tracked in your Beacon account, you can now subscribe to alerts for shipments associated with a specific Live Board. This enables different users to subscribe to different notifications depending on their needs.

For example, a warehouse manager may subscribe to receive arrival and ETA change notifications for inbound shipments to their warehouse. A customer service manager, on the other hand, can subscribe to alerts for their specific customers’ shipments and a logistics manager can choose to receive alerts for any shipments with ETA changes in the last 24 hours or where days on quay exceed 3 days.  

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Point to point sailing schedules

The latest addition to our suite of supply chain planning tools is point to point sailing schedules. 

Accessible via the ‘Plan’ section in your Beacon dashboard, point to point schedules show you upcoming sailing options and expected transit times on your highest volume ocean routes. 

You’ll first be presented with a list of your highest volume ocean routes, how many sailing options are available in the next two weeks, the number of carriers servicing that route and the average transit time.

Clicking into a particular route will show you all the possible options over the next two weeks along with the associated ETD, ETA, carrier, vessel, number of transshipments and transit time.

This feature is available to customers on Business or Pro plans. 

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Improved Live Board sharing 

Sharing a Live Board with your collaborators just got easier. In addition to generating a shareable link, you can now invite others to join your Live Board directly within the sharing pop-up by entering their email address. Invitees will then receive an automated email from Beacon. 

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API enhancements 

The Beacon API has been upgraded to improve interoperability with your other systems and simplify workflow automation. 

The improvements allow Beacon customers to pass custom fields, destination warehouse and carrier code properties into Beacon (along with shipment numbers) to enrich the freight tracking experience. 

Additionally, the Beacon API also now returns more information to our customers. You can now access additional data points for tracked shipments, including:

• Gated in Empty date (ocean containers only)
• Warehouse ETA date
• Associated purchase order numbers
• Associated destination warehouse name
• Associated custom fields

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View and manage tracking credits

Your Beacon subscription includes a set number of tracking credits. To provide better insights into credit usage, you can now view your credit consumption in the new ‘Credit activity’ section of the Settings page. 

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Start your free trial today

Ready to bring order to supply chain and logistics chaos? Beacon is a single hub for freight tracking, stakeholder collaboration, logistics document management, emissions reporting and more. Start your free trial today - no credit card required.

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