CHICAGO, Sept. 19, 2019 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- FourKites®, the leader in predictive supply chain visibility, today introduced Appointment Manager(SM), a free, cloud-based solution designed to help facilities, carriers and 3PLs create, manage and collaborate efficiently on pickup and receiving location appointments. FourKites anticipates that the adoption of Appointment Manager across its shipper network of more than 260 global Fortune 1000 companies will unlock 2.5 million man-hours per day currently wasted on appointment management.
Currently, appointment scheduling for shippers and carriers is time-intensive, largely manual and extremely inefficient – due to disparate standalone systems at pickup and receiving locations, and a lack of integration of those platforms into a single source of truth. Appointment Manager solves for these historically intractable issues by providing one universal interface for shippers and carriers across the supply chain to schedule appointments. As a result, customers can expect to save significant time, while simultaneously improving daily operations and relationships with partners.
"Like all carriers, we feel the acute pain of appointment management every single day," says Sanford Gruhn, Director of Sales at K&B Transportation, Inc. "Our dispatchers manage an incredibly complex workflow, which involves managing scheduling and rescheduling across many different platforms every single day. FourKites' Appointment Manager, which is the first universal platform that integrates with all of our systems, would save our dispatchers approximately eight hours a week, and allow them to shift their focus to higher-value tasks."
FourKites is poised to solve this industry problem because of its pre-existing integrations with all major Transportation Management Systems and Enterprise Resource Planning systems, combined with its dense customer network of Fortune 1000 shippers, carriers and 3PLs. The company's integrated, universal solution will eliminate unnecessary and error-prone manual work, phone calls and emails, and enable customers to shift staff to higher-value tasks.
"Up until this point, there has been no way of escaping the pain of appointment management," said Mathew Elenjickal, FourKites founder and CEO. "This has major downstream implications on detention, driver productivity, and warehouse and dock operations. It is high time we look beyond monetizing something as simple and basic as setting up an appointment at a location. Our hope is that an integrated system will untangle the current mess, facilitate real-time collaboration, and improve relationships between supply chain partners."
Since launching five years ago, FourKites has pioneered the application of predictive visibility to various aspects of supply chain, enabling customers to improve on-time delivery and optimize their operations based on actionable data and predictive intelligence. With a network that now includes more than 260 of the world's top shippers, and tracking more than 600,000 shipments every day, FourKites is leading the evolution of traditional supply chain into a modern connected ecosystem, all built on a foundation of real-time data.
FourKites and Appointment Manager are service marks of FourKites, Inc.
About FourKites
FourKites is the largest predictive supply chain visibility platform, delivering real-time visibility and predictive analytics for the broadest network of Global 1000 companies and third-party logistics firms. Using a proprietary algorithm to calculate shipment arrival times, FourKites enables customers to lower operating costs, improve on-time performance and strengthen end-customer relationships. With a network of more than four million GPS/ELD devices, FourKites covers all modes, including truckload, LTL, ocean, rail, intermodal, last mile and parcel. The platform is optimized for mobile and equipped with market-leading end-to-end security.
To learn more, visit http://www.fourkites.com.
SOURCE FourKites
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