Agistix
Delivering Global Supply Chain Visibility

San Francisco-based Agistix was founded in 2004 with a single mission: to provide true visibility into inbound, outbound and third-party shipments across all carriers and modes. Their thorough data and analytic tools work with a company’s existing systems and deliver deep insight into what’s happening across their entire supply chain.

Agistix’s customers can tap into the many hidden opportunities that lie in the rising volume of supply chain data, without disrupting business processes changes or requiring IT resources. The solutions are built leveraging the company’s deep supply chain expertise and leading-edge technologies.

With the aggregated shipment activity across all carriers and modes, organizations can easily monitor, manage, and measure global supply chain performance. This way, they can effortlessly share data with the broader supply chain stakeholders’ employees, suppliers, carriers, and customers. Agistix CEO Trevor Read recently sat down with CIO Applications to talk about how increased visibility across the logistics pipeline inevitably translates to savings and better decision making.

What are the challenges that organizations face today in the logistics space, and how is Agistix effectively addressing these issues?

They’re overwhelmed! In most circles, supply chain challenges are met with a ‘boil the ocean’ mindset. There are too many disparate systems, partners, and processes to identify savings opportunities, much less to act on them. Moreover, internal IT teams are consumed with ERP upgrades and migrations, often leaving supply chain teams in an endless holding pattern.

CIOs, CTOs, and CSOs tend to love our approach because we don’t rely on internal resources to effect change. While they may not understand the complexity of integrating carrier data feeds, they appreciate that our solution helps them proactively manage exceptions. Agistix users are also able to control spend without taxing their teams or requiring a high level of change management.

By delivering a new level of visibility—and efficiency—to the supply chain, how has Agistix grown to become the respected partner of leading companies across industries? Could you walk us through the features and benefits that Agistix can provide?

Supply chains are essentially the same regardless of industry. If you break the supply chain down to the “micro-transactions” -- mileage calculation, flight status, etc -- the basic ingredients are constant. The differences come in when we talk about commodity attributes and the complexity of shipment by mode and region.

Our data model supports everything from a simple domestic parcel shipment to a far more complex multi-leg, multi-stop, international hazmat shipment. With hundreds or thousands of shipments in progress, clients can’t monitor everything as it happens. Agistix does that for them, delivering at-a-glance real-time tracking for all shipments.

Further, Agistix delivers aggregated data and automatic alerts that allow clients to see and address areas of concern before they develop into costly problems. They no longer have to wait to manage exceptions, increase efficiency, deal with disruption, reduce costs, or be compliant to audits.

Ultimately, we partner with clients to create a flexible and scalable infrastructure to automate and correlate data by leveraging customers’/partners’ ‘best’ technical capabilities such as REST APIs, web services, custom XML, EDI, etc. We eliminate the ‘heavy lifting’ integration work caused by carriers’ wide range of technical capabilities. We then work with our clients to identify critical insights into how their supply chain is performing in real-time.

What’s your favorite client success story?

We work with a $20B aerospace company that has 70k shipments per month and 3k suppliers shipping on their account numbers all day long. Within 60 days of getting operational, we had identified an average of 1,000 shipments being expedited across two percent of their suppliers, resulting in $1.4M in freight spending. Rather than addressing all 3,000 suppliers, the majority of whom were doing their jobs quite well, we targeted the 60 non-compliant suppliers directly. We were able to identify the systemic issues influencing their decision-making in order to better align their operations with the results the client wanted to achieve.

Another story that highlights our value -- we partnered with a $20B automotive parts company that used to receive 900+ emails, phone calls, inquiries per day from employees, suppliers, warehouses, partners, and customers per day. These were people looking for shipment information such as documents, arrival time, rates, report issues, etc. We leveraged our custom ‘point solutions’ to make data ‘self-serve’ through our APIs and white-labelled HTML forms and reduced these inquiries by more than 90%.

What strategies does Agistix employ to thwart the market competition? What differentiates the company from its competitors?

The global supply chain is fraught with outdated technologies, and while there are plenty of upstarts, there’s no explicit blueprint to solve these real-world technology challenges.

Agistix combines deep supply chain knowledge and understanding of inherent challenges, with future-state vision; our technology solution enables companies to efficiently and effectively evolve their supply chain infrastructure and management. We have spent the last fifteen years building a modern, robust platform to facilitate this evolution, and it is no easy task. Most shippers, suppliers, and carriers are still reticent to implement common EDI standards even after 50 years. The evolution to more modern technologies isn’t going to happen overnight, and we not only help clients chart the course, but also work with their timelines.

What does the future hold for Agistix?

Data is the fuel of the 21st century, and it’s imperative that every organization has a supply chain data strategy to compete. Visibility is a buzz word today, most service providers are myopic in their perspective, and most shippers think of an Uber car driving around on a map. To us, true visibility is about providing clients with a single place to see inbound, outbound & 3rd party shipments across all carriers and modes regardless of how or where the shipment was booked.

Expectations surrounding real-time visibility to freight spend, ETAs, exception management, etc. are growing exponentially. Most supply chain teams simply do not have the technology, people, or budget to tackle this internally. The physical movement of goods is hard enough, and in many ways, managing the data chain is every bit as hard. Consequently, the current demand on supply chain teams is untenable, and we partner with companies that need Amazon-level infrastructure at a fraction of the cost.

Every commercial supply chain ecosystem is comprised of suppliers, partners, carriers, brokers and customers that each have their own systems, thereby making it impossible to achieve Amazon-esque efficiencies and visibility. Moreover, each party is adopting different technologies at different rates, and straining IT teams and integration tools to keep up. We provide clients with data architecture to capture and store the broader data set, the blueprint to systematically get from the current state to the Amazon-state, the infrastructure to automate and scale, and the flexibility to customize and evolve.

Software development is continuous and helping companies modernize their supply chain infrastructure is a labour of love. We all experience the profound effect Amazon has had revolutionizing the consumer supply chain and our mission is to provide other industries with the same benefits, bit by bit.