Written by
James Saram
Product Manager

Beacon's supply chain visibility and collaboration platform empowers organizations to achieve more efficient, reliable and sustainable supply chains.

In this article

Supply Chain Glossary
Product Release
Published: 
June 4, 2024

May 2024 Product Roundup: Discover Beacon Hub

This month, the Beacon platform experience is getting a new look and feel with the launch of Beacon Hub.

With this latest update, we’ve redesigned the user journey to make it easier to create and access your Live Boards – putting seamless data sharing, live chat and document management just a click away. 

Keep reading for a full rundown of Beacon Hub and what it means for you.

What is Beacon Hub?

Beacon Hub puts Live Boards at the core of your user experience. Replacing the existing homepage, your Beacon Hub provides a direct gateway to your Live Boards, reducing the time needed to access order and freight tracking updates and collaborate with your customers and supply chain partners. 

New Live Boards can be created directly from your Beacon Hub with just a few clicks, using the same powerful search and filter capabilities you've come to know. Once created, you can share your Live Boards, subscribe to shipment delay notifications, chat with your supply chain stakeholders, manage documents and more.

Why the change?

We introduced Live Boards in 2023 to allow users to create dedicated workspaces to track and collaborate on specific shipments and orders. We have received an overwhelmingly positive response on Live Boards and as such have decided to focus the platform experience around Live Boards.

Common Live Board examples

Delayed shipments

An absolute essential – a Live Board for delayed shipments gives you on-demand insight into the risk in your supply chain. You can share this information with supply chain partners and use the chat functionality to manage exceptions, coordinate action plans and mitigate the fallout.

Customer dashboards 

Custom fields allow you to attach important data points such as customer name to orders and shipments. You can then create a Live Board for each of your customers to give them on-demand access to the latest order updates. Embedded chat, notifications and document sharing mean you can greatly reduce the number of inbound queries managed by your customer service team.

Warehouse dashboards

Warehouses need to know what’s coming so they can be prepared to process it efficiently. Add warehouse locations to your Address Book, then create warehouse-specific inbound freight dashboards and share them with the on-site teams. 

Containers at risk of incurring detention or demurrage

Beacon can help you control demurrage and detention expenses by giving you better insight into at risk containers. Configure your D&D settings, then create a Live Board that shows containers that are nearing (or exceeding) the applicable number of included free days.

Product category dashboards

When a shipment is delayed or disrupted, impacted buyers and merchandising teams need to know. Create a custom field for the product category, then create Live Boards for each and share them with the relevant stakeholders so they have the information on-demand, whenever they need it.

Try Beacon today

Ready to rethink how you collaborate and share information across your supply chain? Create your account to get full access to Beacon for your first 20 shipments, absolutely free.