FedEx Backs FourKites, Teams for FourKites X
June 22, 2022
FedEx and supply chain visibility platform FourKites started a
strategic alliance that will provide businesses with new, more
robust real-time visibility capabilities to help solve their
most pervasive supply chain challenges, become more efficient,
and unlock new growth opportunities. Events like the COVID-19
pandemic, ongoing geopolitical issues, port congestion, and
other global disruptions have revealed the complexities in
keeping interconnected supply chains around the world up and
running. FedEx and FourKites are collaborating to make supply
chains smarter by bringing comprehensive and highly granular
visibility into multi-modal and multi-carrier operations with
the deep network and rich insights of their combined networks.
FourKites’ real-time visibility platform has integrated
intelligence at every point of the supply chain, and currently
supports 2.5 million shipments a day, connecting the supply
chains of 50% of Fortune 500 companies. Through this
collaboration, FourKites will be using its machine learning and
artificial intelligence capabilities with data insights from the
FedEx network – which reaches more than 220 countries and
territories, linking more than 99 percent of the world’s GDP,
through more than 16.5 million shipments daily – to create a new
end-to-end supply chain intelligence platform called FourKites
X. FourKites X will provide tools and insights to help large
shippers and logistics providers mitigate the impacts of
sustained challenges via a suite of offerings ranging from
dynamic planning and pre-shipment, to enhanced visibility and
proactive alerts, to supply chain optimization insights.
To support this alliance and the launch of FourKites X, FedEx
has made a strategic investment in FourKites.
“This is an exciting collaboration between two industry leaders
and innovators coming together to unlock new opportunities for
our customers,” said Sriram Krishnasamy, CEO, FedEx Dataworks.
“If the last two years have taught us anything, it’s that
companies need to work together in order to work smarter and
faster. Our collaboration with FourKites creates a data
ecosystem that will deliver a new level of predictability and
visibility to help businesses build smarter supply chains in
today’s unpredictable and complex business environment.”
“We are excited to announce this groundbreaking platform and
strategic collaboration with FedEx,” said Mathew Elenjickal,
FourKites Founder & CEO. “Our organizations share an unwavering
commitment to customer success through strategic innovation.
Together, we are working to pave the future of global supply
chains, built on a foundation of data and machine learning to
deliver new value to those global supply chains.”
FourKites X – A Complete Picture of Global Supply Chain
Operations
FedEx Dataworks, a business unit in FedEx focused on making
supply chains smarter through a powerful data science approach
and machine learning capabilities, will support FourKites’
development of the new platform, FourKites X, that will help
give customers deeper actionable insights, more accurate ETAs,
and more intelligent supply chains to reduce supply chain
volatility, and improve top-line growth.
The platform is being designed to help large shippers and
logistics providers identify areas of opportunity, such as:
How chief supply chain officers can improve planning to
address empty shelves and manufacturing slowdowns
How companies can use data to turn supply chain crises into chances to improve the customer experience
How chief financial officers can optimize supply chains for
growth and efficiency
“When
it comes to supply chain data, more is always better,” said
Steve Banker, Vice President, Supply Chain Services, at ARC
Advisory Group. “The collaboration between FourKites and FedEx
is exceptional in both the volume of data that it will
aggregate, and in the degree to which it could improve predicted
times of arrival, planning, and more. FourKites X can be a big
step forward for this market.”
Customers of FourKites X will be able to integrate the platform
with existing systems, and they will be able to receive new
capabilities in a modular way with support from data engineers,
data scientists, and user experience experts. The FourKites X
solution will include pre-built applications and an intuitive
dashboard, which will allow customers to unlock things like
pre-shipment weather advisories and supply chain insights.
