Supply chain soft spots dashboard

The report will by default include all shipments delivered since 1 January 2023.

Shipments that have been in shipping status for more than 150 days are excluded from analysis. These shipments may have other issues, such as loggers being lost, that could skew the analysis.

In cases where multiple shipments have the same shipment reference, only the newest shipment will be included in the data. This is due to a an issue in the underlying infrastructure that will be fixed in a future release.

Only excursions that are at or above the excursion severity threshold, i.e. excursions that require manual inspection are included.

Example: Shipment xyz only has excursions of severity low, but the threshold for manual inspection is high, so the shipment will not appear as having an excursion in the report.

Loggers only send out location data on wake up. This means that if the logger is on a 1 hour wakeup interval we will get hourly locations, but if the logger is on a 24 hour wakeup interval we only get one location per day. This means we are more likely to miss points of interests on shipments with long intervals. This also means that in some cases we will only capture the outbound or inbound airport or harbor.

For the same reason as above we might also miss some origin and destinations. When a shipment is on the way to a point of interest, but we never got a ping at an origin location the shipment will be categorized as coming from “Unknown“. It is most likely coming from the origin, but we cannot verify. In the same manner we may not receive a ping at the destination, so the final leg of shipment will be going to “Unknown“.

Since loggers only send location data on wakeups we will not always be able to precisely identify an excursion with a location, but we will place the excursion at the closest location by time.

The accuracy of the loggers can also affect where we display the location. In areas with bad signal the accuracy can be quite low, but in most cases airports and harbors as well as customer locations near major cities have good accuracy (down to meters).

Some customers have multiple overlapping locations (origins and destination) and often with very similar names. In these cases we have grouped the multiple locations into one location in maps. The location name with most shipments is used as the name for the entire group.

While shipments are on planes and in flight mode, they do not send us location information. This means that excursions happening during flight will be mapped to the nearest location ping, which in most cases is the departing airport or the arriving airport. In the report these will be categorized as “En route“ because they due to their timestamp most likely happened en route.

Due to a limitation in the third party data we are using to map countries, shipment locations in South Africa, Mozambique and Gaza and the West Bank are not correctly mapped and will appear as “Others“ in country filters. This will be fixed in a future release.

A few shipments in international waters are also categorized as being in the country “Other“.

The directory of locations in this data model is built on Open Street Map data.