Supply Chain Visibility Providers Reposition as Decision Platforms as Visibility Commoditizes

In the past couple of months, two major companies in the so-called supply chain visibility space have significantly altered their messaging, abandoning “visibility” in favor of “decision” terminology. In September, Roambee, a pioneer of supply chain Internet of Things (IoT), rebranded to Decklar—a portmanteau of "Decision Clarity”—and is actively pushing a message of “decision AI.” This is in line with the direction Roambee had been pursuing to act as the visibility “engine,” aggregating all kinds of visibility data, processing it with Machine Learning (ML) for node and lane intelligence, and enabling in-depth analysis of data with flexible reporting and conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools.

Meanwhile in August, project44, a company that pioneered real-time transportation visibility platforms by aggregating fleet data from carriers and logistics providers, launched its Intelligent TMS within its existing Movement platform and now refers to itself as a “decision intelligence” platform. The Transportation Management System (TMS) offers not only project44’s traditional visibility analytics tools (Estimated Times of Arrival (ETAs), carrier benchmarking, etc.), but also transport brokerage and documentation management and sharing. This is a significant departure from pure-play visibility and marks a change in its strategy: instead of enabling TMS systems, project44 is now entering into direct competition with them.

While both companies come from very different starting points, their ambitions are increasingly similar and driven by the same motivation, best exemplified by Decklar’s statement in its press release that “enterprises are prioritizing their investments in AI-native Systems of Action (SoA), not traditional Systems of Record (SoR) that currently dominate the supply chain landscape.” What is particularly interesting about this statement is that visibility solution providers have been at pains over the years to downplay their ambitions of moving up the stack into more analytics and execution capabilities, emphasizing traditional system of records (like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Warehouse Management Systems (WMSs), or TMSs) and their importance as the backbone that will never go away.

In more and more cases, while new cloud-based platforms continue to partner with traditional systems of record, they are looking to position themselves as both the data and operational layers, relegating traditional systems to purely financial functions. Increasingly, they are data-agnostic platforms, gathering data from IoT devices, traceability and serialization systems, telematics and fleet systems, and any other available information source. Relying on their ability to gather data from the physical supply chain, they increasingly will look to become systems of record for supply chain data—similar to a digital thread—and supply chain intelligence.

These announcements highlight two important ways in which investments in supply chain technology are changing. First, traditional systems of record are often considered challenging systems to integrate and build on. While their financial reporting capabilities are useful, more flexible systems permit better data ingestion and processing capabilities, and are easier to customize for different personas’ and departments’ day-to-day operations.

Second, the concept of visibility itself is increasingly commoditized. This should come as no surprise to anybody, but it still heralds the end of an era in which technology providers have been trying—and largely failing—to monetize visibility platforms with the main function of gathering data from proprietary or third-party IoT devices. Instead, these suppliers have gradually become more agnostic to sources of data. They have focused on appending new features and functions to their platforms, building unique vertical-specific workflows and turning data into operational intelligence, rather than solely location intelligence. While investment in visibility remains high, adopters are increasingly looking at what they can achieve from data beyond the visibility table stakes, which gives rise to new forms of solution providers, or at least shifts the value that they provide.

Indeed, Decklar and project44’s shift are a culmination of a trend that has been emerging for some time. OnAsset Intelligence, like Decklar, has invested heavily in building out its data processing capabilities with ML, making use of its extensive deployed base of devices. Trackonomy, one of the largest and fastest-growing visibility companies in the world, differentiates itself to a great extent through the distributed agent capabilities of its Sentient AI platform, enabling decisions to be made both locally on devices and in the cloud. FourKites has invested heavily in Agentic AI capabilities to drive decision-making within its visibility platform. Overhaul is one breed of risk management platforms that has seen enormous investment in the past 12 months to provide an integrated solution set, such as lane intelligence or supplier compliance auditing. Visibility, or gathering data from the physical supply chain, remains at the heart of what these companies do, but the value they offer comes almost exclusively from the features they layer on top.

It is a refrain in supply chain visibility and other IoT markets, so common as to have become mundane, that it is not the data but the insights that are valuable. While data-driven insights and “actioning” data have been an important part of suppliers’ messaging, most companies in this space have focused on filling the visibility gaps by deploying more IoT devices and aggregating other data sources from the physical supply chain. As these visibility deployments have grown, the data that suppliers have gathered have become increasingly valuable and allowed them to move beyond visibility. Today, they are the natural place for analyzing and querying data, enabling them to become the system in which supply chain professionals work and make decisions every day.

There are risks and opportunities to different approaches. project44’s decision to compete with TMS suppliers is certainly a risk, given the depth of knowledge and sophistication of workflows already contained in these systems. That said, brokerage capabilities are an area that several visibility platforms are exploring—examples include not only project44 with its transport brokerage, but also Overhaul with its insurance brokerage solution. More broadly, the shift toward delivering integrated solution sets (visibility enhanced with execution capabilities) is new territory for visibility suppliers, taking them out of the visibility niche and into the bigger supply chain technology world. There is additional value to be gleaned in this world, particularly through positioning as data and intelligence platforms—a necessary step to avoid irrelevance. But risk exists in how large supply chain technology companies, including TMS and control tower suppliers, respond.