Supply Chain Visibility: Why "Where's My Package" Is a Third of Call Center Calls

In this episode of Rozmowy Logistyków, Piotr Skobało and Adam Sobolewski discuss visibility along the supply chain. They explain what the term actually means in practice, and how it can help lower transport costs and raise inventory turns — not just at the largest companies.

VISIBILITY IS MORE THAN "WHERE'S THE PACKAGE"

The basic definition: being able to state where a product physically is at a given moment — but the real value lies in extending that question into estimating when it will arrive where it needs to. The customer isn't interested in the status "shipped" — they're interested in a specific delivery date. At a large e-commerce company, "where's my package" queries can make up as much as a third of all customer service calls — and improving estimated delivery time (ETA) accuracy by just 1% can translate into a full point of the store's NPS score.

A LESSON FROM THE UBER APP: INFORMATION MATTERS MORE THAN PRECISION

The Uber app doesn't show real-time, second-by-second data — it shows an animation that gives the customer a sense of agency and control, even if it isn't a literal live update. The same psychological pattern (visible today in food-delivery or grocery apps) works in logistics: the customer wants to feel that something is happening, not just know the bare fact.

THE CONTROL TOWER AS THE ANCESTOR OF TODAY'S SOFTWARE

For a decade, the answer to the need for visibility was in-house teams at logistics operators (Control Towers) — people manually checking statuses across a dozen-plus systems from different branches and passing information to the customer by phone or email. Today, software is taking over that role, eliminating the cost of staff dedicated solely to manually tracking shipments.

WHAT DEPLOYING VISIBILITY SOFTWARE REALLY DELIVERS

A survey of supply chain directors shows: 40% cited improved day-to-day operational work, 35% cost reduction, 29% better production quality, almost 30% better inventory turns. A non-obvious effect: better supply chain visibility allows safety stock to be calculated more precisely — because it depends not only on sales variability, but also on delivery-time variability, which is hard to estimate without real data on how shipments actually behave.

THREE LEVELS OF FUNCTIONALITY: TRACK & TRACE, PREDICTION, AUTOMATION

The basic level is pulling statuses from many carriers into one place (it's not hard to have visibility with one supplier — the hard part is managing dozens or hundreds of carriers at once). The second level is prediction: good platforms don't just show the current delay (e.g. 14 days on the Shenzhen-Hamburg route), they predict how that delay will compound with further bottlenecks down the chain (e.g. congestion at the destination port). The third level is active management: platforms like Romania's Postis let you embed automatic carrier-switching rules (e.g. "if on-time performance drops below 90%, switch to a pricier but more reliable option" or "if transit exceeds 3 days, switch to air freight").

WHO DOMINATES THE MARKET — AND WHY THAT ISN'T ALWAYS THE RIGHT SOLUTION FOR YOU

Gartner's Magic Quadrant points to the leaders: project44 (stronger in the US), 4flow, CargoPoint (stronger in Europe) — all focused mainly on full-truckload (FTL) transport. The entry threshold for such a ranking is usually a company with revenue around 50 million USD, so smaller, functionally excellent solutions don't show up there. For smaller volumes (e.g. a chain with 14-15 million shipments a year), custom-built software outside such rankings can be the better solution.

WHY COMPANIES STILL AREN'T DEPLOYING THIS

Three most common reasons: habit ("it worked somehow"), uncertainty about choosing between a large and a small vendor (due diligence can take many months), and fear of deep system lock-in after integrating with a WMS, ERP, or CRM. The real counter-argument: solutions exist today costing about as much as one transport planner's monthly salary, with no implementation cost, covering 9 out of 10 real needs — manually calling and emailing to ask "where is my shipment" is simply no longer a way of working worth settling for.