Forto claims the offering provides the right information at the right time to empower supply chain managers to proactively mitigate or avoid altogether the impact of common shipment disruptions.
The service is based on the ‘Moment of Truth’ concept, which refers to moments that influence user and customer relationships with the product and/or brand providing the product.
To get the inside track on what this means for end users, as well as the work that went on to build this new service behind the scenes, we sat down for a chat with Kamil B. Rodoper, Forto’s Chief Product Officer.
According to Rodoper, via Moments of Truth, Forto really wanted to understand what matters for the customer in the transport lifecycle.
The aim was to find what customers care about, and for those factors that are important – identify who is responsible.
Rodoper told trans.iNFO that the Forto team “reviewed everything they could get their hands on”, whether it be customer meeting notes captured in Salesforce, tender documents or customer support tickets – things that created a narrative around what customers care about during the transport lifecycle.
“We distilled the insights to a set of questions that customers are asking to their providers and themselves as their shipment progresses, walked backwards to figure out how we could answer those questions with high confidence. What do we need to know about the state of the transport to provide an answer? What categories of data is critical at what quality level for an answer? Which data sources, such as customs agencies and carriers, may need cleansing before we can rely on the data? Our goal was to have the highest confidence for a definitive answer that we know will help customers make decisions and take actions.” Rodoper told trans.iNFO, responding to our question about the definitive-sounding nature of the Moments of Truth service.
Rodoper added:
“With MoTs, what we are trying to do is more than just passing the data we receive from the ecosystem partners to the customers as visibility updates – which is generally the case in the industry. We are interpreting, cleansing, cross-checking the data from multuiple sources for quality and accuracy, before curating a notification to the customers within the context of their shipment. Why do it this way? Because approaching transport visibility through customer lens enables us to define a strategy for actionability on behalf of the customer, when the transport is disrupted.”
The Forto Chief Product Officer says the company’s intent with ‘Moments of Truth’ is to reduce the number of decisions that the customer has to make when moving their goods and provide them with the information they need to take actions with confidence.
The visibility space is becoming rather crowded at the moment, something Rodoper acknowledged during our discussion. The advantage of Forto is that it brings its own technology with operational experience, as Rodoper explains:
“If you had all the data in the world, half of the time you’ll have low quality due to data conflicting with the other half. Our advantage is that we are a freight forwarding company that has hundreds of operators in Europe and Asia moving goods every day. These operators use our own Forto TMS (Transport Management System) that is built in house. This setup is our advantage over other providers in the industry, as having direct access to the lifecycle of thousands of shipments at any given time provides Forto with a continuous test and refinement opportunity for our technology. When we make decisions, we use our own business as a sounding board:Here’s how we’re thinking, does this align with what you’re facing when working with customers? How best we can respond to customers when moving the goods?”
Forto’s press release touches on the process of ‘data cleansing’. In Rodoper’s words, this concerns a set of rules and procedures that rely on humans to make sure that the system data is accurate in certain ways.
“As part of this project, we worked on a lot of our standard operating procedures with our operators. When we have the suspicion that something may not be accurate, humans get involved and try to validate that data and the information that we receive from the suppliers and carriers”, the Forto Chief Product Officer told trans.iNFO.
Another observation Rodoper made was how ports like Rotterdam have made strides with digitalisation, in turn facilitating the creation of tools like Forto’s Moments of Truth.
“Integration [with the Port of Rotterdam] was fairly straightforward work thanks to their documentation and platform. Tech adoption within the ecosystem enables higher quality of service for every player involved, as it becomes easy to use existing data to its full extent, and detect anomalies,” said Rodoper.
