Beacon Insider: July - Introducing Network Performance

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Every month, someone senior asks how the supply chain performed against plan. Which routes ran over. How much D&D you took. Whether the invoices were right. Getting a straight answer takes weeks of stitching spreadsheets together, and often it never really comes.

That is the gap Network Performance closes. It is the biggest release we have shipped in a while, and it came straight out of what our customers asked us for.

What it is

A new tab in Beacon that shows how every route and carrier is performing against plan, in one place. Freight spend against contract. D&D incidence. Volumes shipped against what you committed to. Roll rate. Invoice error rate, flagged automatically, because that number should be zero.

Beacon ranks each route by status, so the first thing you see is where to look. Needs action, worth watching, or on track. Then you filter to whatever you are chasing. One carrier across the whole network. Every route running over ten per cent D&D. It takes a click.

None of it is guesswork. The plan is what you contracted. The actual is what happened.

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Why it matters

You see where the money is going, and whether it should be. Freight over plan, D&D stacking up, invoices you were about to pay with errors in them, all in one view.

You answer the board in minutes, not weeks. The financial view breaks down volumes, spend, D&D and surcharges, and cost per container, month by month, plan against actual. VPs and C-suite have told us this normally takes weeks to assemble. Here it is ready before the meeting starts.

And you free up working capital. Catch the overspend, the invoice errors and the D&D you should never have paid, and that is money back in the business.

What comes next

Network Performance is a proof of concept, rolling out to a first group of customers now. We think this is where supply chain insight is heading. We will open it up to more of you over the coming months.

If it looks useful, you know where to find us.