In a bid to provide companies with more robust real-time visibility capabilities to help solve their most pervasive supply chain challenges, FedEx Corp. and supply chain visibility company FourKites announced on June 21 that they had formed a strategic alliance.
The two companies will collaborate to make supply chains smarter by bringing comprehensive and highly granular visibility into multi-modal and multi-carrier operations with the deep network and rich insights of their combined networks.
Through this collaboration, FourKites, which supports 2.5 million shipments a day connecting the supply chain of 50% of the Fortune 500 companies, will be using its machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities with data insights from the FedEx network – which reaches more than 220 countries and territories, linking more than 99% of the world’s GDP, through more than 16.5 million shipments daily. This will create a new end-to-end supply chain intelligence platform called FourKites X. FourKites X will provide tools and insights to help large shippers and logistics providers mitigate the impacts of sustained challenges via a suite of offerings ranging from dynamic planning and pre-shipment, to enhanced visibility and proactive alerts, to supply chain optimization insights.
“If the last two years have taught us anything, it’s that companies need to work together in order to work smarter and faster," said Sriram Krishnasamy, CEO, FedEx Dataworks, in a statement. "Our collaboration with FourKites creates a data ecosystem that will deliver a new level of predictability and visibility to help businesses build smarter supply chains in today’s unpredictable and complex business environment.”
FourKites X – A Complete Picture of Global Supply Chain Operations
FedEx Dataworks, a business unit in FedEx focused on making supply chains smarter through a powerful data science approach and machine learning capabilities, will support FourKites’ development of the new platform, FourKites X, that will help give customers deeper actionable insights, more accurate ETAs, and more intelligent supply chains to reduce supply chain volatility, and improve top-line growth.
The platform is being designed to help large shippers and logistics providers identify areas of opportunity, such as:
- How chief supply chain officers can improve planning to address empty shelves and manufacturing slowdowns
- How companies can use data to turn supply chain crises into chances to improve the customer experience
- How chief financial officers can optimize supply chains for growth and efficiency
“When it comes to supply chain data, more is always better,” said Steve Banker, vice president, Supply Chain Services, at ARC Advisory Group, in a statement. “The collaboration between FourKites and FedEx is exceptional in both the volume of data that it will aggregate, and in the degree to which it could improve predicted times of arrival, planning and more. FourKites X can be a big step forward for this market.”
Customers of FourKites X will be able to integrate the platform with existing systems, and they will be able to receive new capabilities in a modular way with support from data engineers, data scientists and user experience experts. The FourKites X solution will include pre-built applications and an intuitive dashboard, which will allow customers to unlock things like pre-shipment weather advisories and supply chain insights.
