“Freight visibility” is something that many warehouses find themselves striving for, even if they don’t fully understand why.

What is freight visibility?

Put simply, freight visibility is the ability to know where your shipments are at all times, during their entire journey. It includes the real-time monitoring of packages that are out for delivery, frequent updates on when items will be replenished, and constant awareness of what goods you’re expecting at which point from your vendors.

This can have a number of benefits, from reducing the number of mistakes across the supply chain, to improving customer satisfaction by giving them a better understanding of where their goods are, and when they can expect them to show up.

While this is always a positive thing, it gained a newfound importance both during and after the pandemic, when supply chains across the world were in disarray, and everyone was stuck at home wondering where the heck their packages were.

Of course, like so many other things in the world of logistics, achieving better freight visibility is easier said than done, and may require some careful planning and reworking of your current logistics strategies.

Improving freight visibility in your warehouse

Having a better understanding of what goods are coming to your warehouse, what goods are leaving your warehouse, and where they all are at any given time sounds like a great idea, doesn’t it? Like many things in warehousing, however, this is easier said than done.

One crucial step to improving overall freight visibility is to improve awareness of your products before they arrive. This can include:

• Live tracking of the location of your goods
• Optimizing the routes of incoming shipments
• Monitoring driver performance
• Improved communication with your customers as to the status and whereabouts of their items

This may require a review of some key business metrics on your part. Are you already monitoring things like service times, on-time delivery rates, and customer feedback? If not, starting with these simple data points will help improve visibility for both you and your clients.

However, the mistake a lot of warehouses make is assuming that freight visibility ends when the goods arrive. If your warehouse handles outgoing orders in any fashion, freight visibility is just as important for these outbound goods as it is for anything coming into your warehouse.

Improved freight visibility for outbound goods can be improved by taking steps such as:

• Better tracking and RFID scanning for the goods being stored on your pallet racking, as well as on your specialty shelves like cantilever racks
• Real-time tracking on the status of packages that have yet to leave the warehouse, to give your customers a better idea of both when they might begin transit, as well as their overall delivery day
• Working to improve demand forecasting, to better predict potential delays or issues in existing & new deliveries

Improving your freight and shipment visibility requires a little foresight on your part – but as you take these steps, you’ll begin to notice your overall transparency improve, and things will begin to flow a lot more smoothly into and out of your warehouse.