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Why Track and Trace Is Essential for Modern Supply Chains by Chris Cunnane, Intersystems

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Why Track And Trace Is Essential For Modern Supply Chains By Chris Cunnane, Intersystems

Supply chains face constant disruptions, from weather events and geopolitical disruptions to labor shortages and capacity issues. These disruptions can be managed by using decision intelligence through AI, machine learning, and simulations to predict outcomes, weigh scenarios, and recommend the best course of action to overcome these disruptions. But what data are these decisions based on?

Track and trace is the ability to monitor the movement of goods or items throughout the global supply chain, providing visibility through both real-time and historical location and status information. While supply chain visibility gives you real-time data on inventory, shipments, delays, and demand, the ability to act on this data is crucial. Decision intelligence bridges the gap between raw data and strategic actions, adding a layer of contextual understanding and recommendations.

At its core, track and trace is about more than just knowing where a product is. It’s about creating a digital thread of information that follows products from origin to final delivery. When data flows seamlessly across the supply chain, organizations can meet compliance requirements, respond to disruptions, and deliver the transparency customers increasingly demand. While usually seen as a single solution, track and trace comprises of two parts:

Tracking: Monitoring the real-time location and movement of a product as it moves through the global supply chain.
Tracing: Looking back at the product’s history: where it came from, how it was made, and how it moved.

Together, they provide a full picture of a product’s lifecycle. Typically, this is powered by technologies like barcodes, RFID, QR codes, IoT sensors, telematics (ELD/GPS)and the underlying data platforms that can capture, store, and integrate information from many different sources.

The Benefits of Track and Trace Technology

Delivering End-to-End Supply Chain Visibility

Visibility is a persistent challenge for supply chains that span continents and involve dozens of stakeholders. Without accurate, real-time information, companies risk delayed shipments, stockouts, or excess inventory. Track and trace provides the transparency needed to manage proactively rather than reactively. With a digital view of product movements, organizations can:

Improve demand planning
Optimize inventory management
Reroute shipments when disruptions occur
Keep customers informed with accurate ETAs

Meeting Consumer Expectations for Transparency and Sustainability

Today’s customers care about more than price. They want to know how and where their products were made, whether materials were ethically sourced, and if processes were sustainable.
Track and trace allows companies to put that information directly in customers’ hands. For example, a QR code on packaging can reveal a coffee bean’s journey from farm to cup, or a vaccine’s journey from lab to clinic. Transparency builds trust, which builds loyalty.
This transparency extends to sustainability initiatives as well. Sustainability isn’t just a brand differentiator anymore; it’s a requirement. Investors, regulators, and consumers expect organizations to measure and report on their environmental and social impact.
Track and trace plays a central role here. By connecting the dots across supply chain partners, organizations can:

Track carbon emissions across product journeys
Verify responsible sourcing of raw materials
Improve recyclability by monitoring material lifecycles

The ability to prove sustainability efforts with data is what transforms promises into measurable outcomes.

Safeguarding Health and Safety

Industries such as pharmaceuticals, food, and medical devices have no margin for error. Regulatory frameworks like the U.S. Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA) and the FDA’s Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) require traceability at the lot or even unit level.

If there’s a safety concern for counterfeit drugs or contaminated food, track and trace enables organizations to identify affected batches and act quickly. Instead of pulling all products off the shelf, companies can target only the impacted items, minimizing cost while protecting consumers. This ensures safety for patients and makes product recalls more efficient for companies.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) estimates counterfeit goods account for more than $500 billion annually in lost value. Track and trace creates a verifiable chain of custody to confirm authenticity. This builds trust and protects revenue, while also safeguarding brand reputation.

The Future of Track and Trace – Decision Intelligence

The future of track and trace is not just about knowing where a product is. It’s about predicting what might happen next. This is where decision intelligence comes in. InterSystems now brings decision intelligence-enabled track and trace capabilities to your supply chain through its partnership with Descartes MacroPoint.

The need to know where your products are (whether in transport to the warehouse, port, store, manufacturing plant, or customer anywhere in the end-to-end supply chain), when delays occur, and be alerted to these delays, is critical to ensure a positive customer experience. InterSystems provides a single source of truth with full interconnected supply chain visibility to anticipate, simulate, and activate your next move. AI-based actionable insights make recommendations to solve problems before they occur.

Track and Trace Cloud Service with Descartes MacroPoint

InterSystems Track and Trace Cloud Service with Descartes MacroPoint is a fully managed cloud service to bring real time shipment tracking and continuous in-transit risk monitoring data to the InterSystems Supply Chain Orchestrator decision intelligence platform. The solution includes out-of-the-box data integrations and API-enabled integration to ensure productivity. Advanced analytics improve planning for terminal congestion, labor shortages, and dwell times across air, parcel, IOT enabled, rail, TL/LTL.

By partnering with Descartes MacroPoint, InterSystems customers can leverage the Descartes Global Logistics Network (GLN), the world’s largest collaborative, multimodal logistics messaging network. Using the GLN, hundreds of thousands of trading partners, logistics services providers, and carriers connect and collaborate through 24.6 billion transactions annually. The network supports real-time GPS, EDI, and API-based capacity requests, bookings, statuses, and customs messages.

Accelerate Time to Value with Decision Intelligence

InterSystems Supply Chain Orchestrator is an AI-enabled supply chain decision intelligence platform that predicts disruptions before they occur, and optimally handles when they do, so you’ll be ready to manage the unexpected with confidence.

InterSystems unifies disparate data sources by providing a real-time connective tissue—with built-in predictive and prescriptive analytics—that’s complementary and non-disruptive to your existing infrastructure. Using InterSystems Track and Trace Cloud Service with InterSystems Supply Chain Orchestrator empowers you to make faster decisions.

Track and Trace: From Compliance to Competitive Advantage

Track and trace ensures safety, combats counterfeits, enables precise recalls, delivers transparency, and powers sustainability initiatives. Most importantly, it builds the trust that organizations need to thrive in an era of rising expectations.

But none of this is possible without a strong data foundation. To make track and trace work, organizations must integrate data across disparate systems and partners, ensure its accuracy, and make it available in real time. Track and trace is not just about compliance. It’s about creating supply chains that are safer, smarter, and more connected. And in today’s world, that’s not just a competitive advantage; it’s a necessity.

Chris Cunnane is the Supply Chain Product Marketing Manager at InterSystems. In this role, he is responsible for developing and executing marketing strategy and content for the InterSystems supply chain technology suite. Chris has 20+ years of supply chain expertise, leading the supply chain practice at ARC Advisory Group, as well as holding various sales, marketing, and operations roles in the wholesale, retail, and automotive parts markets. He holds a BA in Communications from Stonehill College and an MA in Global Marketing Communications from Emerson College.

The post Why Track and Trace Is Essential for Modern Supply Chains by Chris Cunnane, Intersystems appeared first on Logistics Viewpoints.

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Shipsy Connects Transportation Orchestration With Exception Response

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Transportation management is expanding beyond planning loads and tendering freight. Modern platforms are increasingly expected to coordinate carriers, track execution, optimize routes, manage exceptions, communicate with stakeholders, and use live operating data to adjust decisions while freight is moving.

Shipsy is positioned around that broader logistics-orchestration model. Its cloud platform spans transportation management, carrier allocation, freight procurement, shipment tracking, route optimization, first-mile through last-mile workflows, and analytics. The company also emphasizes AI-enabled capabilities intended to automate planning and execution decisions across increasingly complex logistics networks.

The connection to exception management is significant. Transportation generates a constant stream of deviations: capacity changes, missed pickups, route delays, delivery risks, documentation problems, and customer-service exceptions. A platform that already coordinates transportation workflows has the opportunity to detect those events, assess their impact, and automate an appropriate response inside the same operating environment.

The buyer question is how well those capabilities scale across real-world complexity. Organizations should evaluate optimization quality, carrier and system connectivity, geographic depth, data latency, workflow configurability, and governance for automated actions. The most useful AI in transportation will be the AI that reliably improves execution, not simply the AI that adds another interface.

Shipsy is included in the Logistics Viewpoints Transportation Management Systems MarketMap and Autonomous Exception Management MarketMap. The combination reflects the increasingly close relationship between transportation management and the systems responsible for identifying and resolving operational exceptions.

The post Shipsy Connects Transportation Orchestration With Exception Response appeared first on Logistics Viewpoints.

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Beyond the Silos: Five Technology Markets Are Converging Into a New Supply Chain Architecture

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Join me on Thursday, October 29 at 11:00 AM ET for ARC Advisory Group’s webinar, Beyond the Silos: Five MarketMaps Shaping the Next Supply Chain Technology Architecture. We will use ARC’s MarketMaps for Warehouse Management Systems, Transportation Management Systems, Supply Chain Planning, Decision Intelligence, and Autonomous Exception Management to examine where these markets are converging, where they remain distinct, and what that means for the architecture you are building.

REGISTER FOR THE WEBINAR

If you are evaluating, replacing, or integrating supply chain technology, this is the conversation to have before your next major technology decision.

Supply chain technology has traditionally been organized into distinct application categories. Warehouse Management Systems managed activity inside the four walls. Transportation Management Systems planned and executed freight movements. Supply Chain Planning systems developed forecasts and plans. Other applications handled visibility, analytics, or specific operational problems.

Those distinctions made sense when the applications themselves operated largely as separate systems.

They make considerably less sense today.

The boundaries between supply chain technology markets are beginning to blur as vendors expand beyond their traditional domains and companies demand faster connections between planning, decision-making, exception management, and execution. The result is not necessarily the emergence of one enormous supply chain platform. Instead, we are seeing the development of a more interconnected technology architecture in which responsibilities increasingly overlap.

That creates both opportunity and complexity for supply chain technology buyers.

WMS and TMS Are Expanding Beyond Their Traditional Boundaries

Warehouse Management Systems remain responsible for the core disciplines of inventory movement, receiving, putaway, picking, packing, and shipping. But modern WMS platforms increasingly extend into labor management, robotics orchestration, yard operations, order fulfillment, transportation coordination, and broader execution workflows.

Transportation Management Systems are undergoing a similar evolution. TMS applications once focused primarily on load planning, carrier selection, tendering, and freight settlement. Today, many platforms incorporate real-time transportation visibility, appointment scheduling, dock coordination, capacity intelligence, analytics, and increasingly sophisticated decision support.

This means the boundary between warehouse and transportation execution is becoming increasingly important.

A trailer arriving at a distribution center is simultaneously a transportation event, a yard event, a dock event, and potentially a warehouse labor-planning event. The technology architecture has to reflect that operational reality.

The question is no longer simply whether a company needs WMS and TMS. The more interesting question is how those systems exchange information and coordinate decisions.

Supply Chain Planning Is Moving Closer to Execution

The same convergence is happening between planning and execution.

Historically, Supply Chain Planning systems developed plans that execution applications were expected to carry out. But a plan that cannot account for actual inventory, transportation capacity, warehouse constraints, labor availability, or changing demand conditions quickly loses value.

Planning therefore becomes much more powerful when it can incorporate execution realities.

The architectural challenge is closing the distance between identifying what should happen and understanding what can actually happen.

This is pushing planning systems toward more continuous planning processes while execution platforms increasingly incorporate predictive and prescriptive capabilities of their own.

The boundary between planning and execution is therefore becoming less of a handoff and more of a feedback loop.

Decision Intelligence Introduces Another Layer

Decision Intelligence adds another dimension to this architecture.

Supply chains generate thousands of decisions every day: whether to expedite an order, change a carrier, shift inventory, modify production, prioritize a customer, alter a fulfillment path, or respond to a disruption.

Traditionally, those decisions have been distributed across applications, business rules, spreadsheets, control towers, and human judgment.

Decision Intelligence technologies attempt to create a more systematic approach by combining data, analytics, business context, optimization, and increasingly artificial intelligence to help organizations evaluate available choices.

That raises an important architectural question.

Which system should actually own the decision?

A planning application may identify an inventory imbalance. A transportation system may recognize a capacity problem. A warehouse system may understand the operational constraints. A Decision Intelligence platform may evaluate several alternatives.

Determining where the decision should reside becomes as important as determining which systems provide the underlying information.

Autonomous Exception Management Addresses the Moment the Plan Breaks

Perhaps the most interesting emerging category is Autonomous Exception Management.

Supply chains rarely operate exactly according to plan. Shipments arrive late. Demand changes. Production lines stop. Inventory becomes unavailable. Weather disrupts transportation. Suppliers miss commitments.

Traditional systems frequently identify these problems but still rely heavily on people to determine what to do next.

Autonomous Exception Management attempts to shorten that cycle by identifying disruptions, understanding their business implications, evaluating potential responses, and in some cases initiating corrective action.

This represents an important shift.

Supply chain technology has spent decades becoming better at creating plans and executing transactions. The next frontier may be becoming better at managing the space between those two activities, when reality diverges from the plan.

That is also where Decision Intelligence, planning, transportation, warehouse execution, and exception management increasingly intersect.

The Architecture Matters More Than the Application Category

For technology buyers, these overlapping capabilities create a new challenge.

Simply comparing WMS vendors against other WMS vendors, or TMS vendors against other TMS vendors, does not necessarily reveal how a technology stack will operate as a whole.

Organizations increasingly need to ask architectural questions.

Where should planning occur? Which system should identify an exception? Which application has enough context to evaluate possible responses? Which system should initiate execution? What data needs to move between platforms? And where should humans remain directly involved in the decision?

There will not be one universal answer.

Different companies will make different architectural choices depending on their operational complexity, existing technology investments, organizational structure, and strategic priorities.

But one principle is becoming increasingly clear: adding another powerful application without understanding how it fits into the broader architecture can simply create another technology silo.

Five MarketMaps, One Emerging Architecture

On October 29, ARC Advisory Group will examine this convergence through five ARC MarketMaps: Warehouse Management Systems, Transportation Management Systems, Supply Chain Planning, Decision Intelligence, and Autonomous Exception Management.

These markets are not becoming identical. Each continues to address a distinct set of supply chain problems.

But the relationships between them are becoming increasingly important.

The next generation of supply chain architecture will likely be defined less by rigid application categories and more by how effectively companies connect four fundamental functions: planning what should happen, deciding what to do, managing what changes, and executing the response.

Understanding those relationships is becoming essential for organizations modernizing their supply chain technology environments.

Before You Make Your Next Supply Chain Technology Decision

If your company is buying, replacing, or integrating WMS, TMS, Supply Chain Planning, Decision Intelligence, or exception-management technology, the important question is no longer simply which product fits a category.

You also need to understand where that technology belongs in the larger architecture, what decisions it should own, what other systems it must work with, and where overlapping functionality creates either value or unnecessary complexity.

That is exactly what we will address in this webinar.

Join me Thursday, October 29 at 11:00 AM ET for Beyond the Silos: Five MarketMaps Shaping the Next Supply Chain Technology Architecture.

We will put all five markets on the table together and examine how planning, decisions, exceptions, transportation, and warehouse execution are beginning to form a broader supply chain technology architecture.

If you expect to make a significant supply chain technology decision over the next 12–24 months, register now. Make sure your next investment strengthens the architecture instead of becoming the next silo.

REGISTER NOW — OCTOBER 29, 11:00 AM ET

The post Beyond the Silos: Five Technology Markets Are Converging Into a New Supply Chain Architecture appeared first on Logistics Viewpoints.

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Decision Intelligence in 2026: From Analytical Insight to Consequential Decisions

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Decision Intelligence is best understood not as another AI label, but as the discipline of improving consequential decisions. Enterprises already have analytics, dashboards, planning systems, visibility platforms, and increasingly capable models; the real question is whether those capabilities materially improve a decision and shorten the path from changing conditions to coordinated action.

Analytics can explain what happened and predict what may happen. Decision Intelligence goes further by connecting the signal to context, tradeoffs, priorities, and an operating choice. The difference is material: a forecast has value only when the organization can decide what to change because of it. The earlier discussion of a logistics control layer helps locate Decision Intelligence architecturally: between observed operating state and the governed actions that established execution systems must carry out.

ERP, planning, TMS, WMS, visibility, risk, and network platforms remain systems of record and execution; decision intelligence sits above and across them where context is assembled, tradeoffs are evaluated, actions are prioritized, and responses are coordinated. This is why traditional application boundaries are beginning to blur. Planning, visibility, risk, logistics, and enterprise platforms can all participate if they demonstrate real decision depth rather than simply expose more information.

The relevant examples include rebalancing inventory after a disruption, protecting a priority customer during constrained capacity, choosing among freight alternatives, responding to supplier risk, or deciding whether an exception should be automated, escalated, or left alone. Buyers should ask what decision is improved, what context is assembled, what tradeoffs are evaluated, what authority is required, and how the chosen action reaches execution. If those answers remain vague, the product may be analytics or workflow rather than Decision Intelligence.

A platform can be deep in one decision domain or broad across many functions. Neither is universally better. The right fit depends on the decisions the enterprise is trying to improve, the time horizon, the data and systems involved, and whether coordination across organizational boundaries is central to the problem.

Evaluate decision fit, decision depth, operating reach, context quality, scenario and tradeoff capability, workflow and execution connectivity, governance, explainability, evidence quality, and referenceable outcomes and measure decision quality, decision latency, recommendation acceptance, outcome improvement, operating reach, scenario usefulness, cross-functional coordination, execution connectivity, auditability, and measurable business impact. The strongest proof is not an AI feature list; it is a referenceable operating outcome showing better decision quality, faster response, or improved coordination.

The shift from insight to consequential decisions is what makes Decision Intelligence strategically interesting. It focuses the market on the business outcome that matters: not how much intelligence a platform can produce, but whether the organization makes a better decision because of it.

Decision Intelligence has to reach a consequential operating choice

The strongest way to keep the category disciplined is to begin with a decision class rather than a technology label. A platform may use optimization, machine learning, simulation, generative AI, knowledge graphs, workflow, or event intelligence. Those technologies are relevant only insofar as they improve the quality, speed, coordination, or traceability of an actual supply chain decision.

That standard also separates DI from horizontal analytics and generic enterprise AI. Buyers should ask what changed because the platform was present: which option was selected differently, which tradeoff became visible, which response happened sooner, which approval path became clearer, and whether the decision reached execution. The output is not the end product; the improved decision is.

Related Logistics Viewpoints research

2026 Supply Chain Decision Intelligence Market Map
The New Architecture of Logistics
Systems Engineering in Logistics
What Is Supply Chain Decision Intelligence, and Why It Matters Now

Request the 2026 Supply Chain Decision Intelligence Market Map Brochure

The 2026 Market Map is designed to help organizations understand the structure of the Decision Intelligence market, evaluate provider differences, and identify the capabilities most relevant to their operating environment. If your organization is evaluating Decision Intelligence platforms or clarifying where decision intelligence fits within the broader technology architecture, I would be glad to provide the Market Map brochure and discuss the evaluation questions and provider differences most relevant to your requirements.

Request the Decision Intelligence Market Map Brochure

For technology providers

Providers may request the brochure, discuss the research framework, or contact me to confirm how their capabilities are represented in the market assessment.

Discuss the research or confirm your profile

The post Decision Intelligence in 2026: From Analytical Insight to Consequential Decisions appeared first on Logistics Viewpoints.

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