Fortigo
New Age Logistics Management Systems

For companies seeking to reduce costs, improve customer satisfaction, and increase profitability, Fortigo automates, optimizes, and audits logistics decisions. Fortigo plugs into established supply-chain applications and provides a rapid return on investment by optimizing and deploying closed-loop logistics processes, minimizing ship-to-order times, and streamlining collaboration with logistics providers.

Founded in 2000, Fortigo is led by a team of experts in logistics optimization and enterprise web-based software. Fortigo primarily caters to two main sectors of the supply chain—transportation management and freight audit and payment services. The logistics technology solution provider offers its best-in-class products to the market as individual packages or a combination. It empowers logistics providers to effectively execute all their logistic transportation needs via a single platform.

In an engaging conversation with CIO Applications, George Kontoravdis, President at Fortigo discusses Fortigo’s exclusive solutions, and the difference they bring to the table while helping their customers streamline, innovate, and save money.

On the emerging trends in the logistics landscape

Rising digital literacy and consumer awareness about the usage of different online platforms for making customized purchasing decisions, the digitalization of the logistics industry is the emerging trend gaining the most traction. The logistics and supply chain industries handle and process an enormous amount of data, making it ripe for advanced emerging technology solutions. The challenge is to take advantage of the data points that are continuously fed into the system. We at Fortigo are well positioned to address the data challenges that affect our customers, and consequently, we provide the right solution to optimize their logistics workflows. We have designed and developed a robust reporting engine to aid our large customers in making sense of the plethora of data and leverage this extensive and valuable input to their advantage. At Fortigo, we actively work on taking all this information, normalizing it, cleaning it up, and presenting it to the end-user as actionable data for logistics executives.

Benefits to clients through Fortigo’s solution

TMS is an end-to-end execution and visibility system.

The platform equips users with functionalities such as logging a transportation order, capturing freight information, and applying a business rules module to validate every decision according to logistics execution parameters. Further, to conduct specific shipments in a flexible and agile manner, Fortigo applies an optimization model to find the most favorable delivery option. There are multiple interfaces to connect these independent carriers to Fortigo, whether they are real-time or EDI-based communication. Once the load is handed to the carrier, the solution enables users to track that package from shipment to delivery by monitoring statuses and handling the management. We have roll-ups that can spot trends and gain deeper insights on subsequent freight order data. The overall process enables our customers to ensure that every package is shipped according to a logistics strategy and in an economical method. For international shipments, the system will not allow a package to be shipped until the required freight information is captured, cross-referenced, and verified.

Fortigo provides a freight audit and payment platform as well that can be configured in many different ways to suit our customers’ needs. We take freight invoices and bounce those against contracted rates. One differentiating factor at Fortigo that separates us from the rest of the players is that we audit and validate everything at the charge code level. This is done to check whether the payment is valid from a rate perspective and if it is accurate and applicable for a particular shipment. The entire process allows our customers to realize savings of 3-5 percent in the first year of deployment. Given that our clients are typically large companies with at least 15 million dollars of transportation spend, our auditing platform empowers them to generate significant hard dollar savings quickly.

On successfully scaling client operations and mitigating their problems

At Fortigo, we are proud of our reputation as a formidable TMS solution provider. Our expertise is reflected in our solutions, and we enjoy a consistently happy customer base. Recently, a leading national food and beverage distribution company approached us for enhanced visibility, tracking, and exception management in their logistics operations. A few key challenges were fragmented information flow across the supply chain, manual load tenders to carriers, limited visibility to inbound loads, and restrictions to monitor/manage exceptions. We transformed the daily management of 2500+ purchase orders per week from a mostly manual process to a highly streamlined automated process. By deploying our TMS, our client increased their orders by 20 percent and reallocated a fifth of their staff to other duties.

On Fortigo’s recent achievements, and a glimpse into its future

Last year, we opened our first development center outside the U.S., and plan to expand in that area to gain more bandwidth to help us with the innovative solutions we build for our customers. We strive to enable logistics professionals to deploy our technology and use it with minimal IT interaction and with limited involvement from our side. For the future, the real drive at Fortigo is to make plug-and-play TMS deployment a reality.