Dutch location data company Here Technologies has entered a five-year collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help organisations improve their supply chain visibility, transportation and logistics (T&L), fleet routing, and ETAs.

According to Gartner, real-time transportation visibility continues to be a key priority for shippers and 3PLs, and their customers, and by 2023 half of global enterprises will have invested in real-time transportation visibility. Another Gartner report says that, increasingly, supply chain visibility adoption is no longer a nice to have for any organisation no matter the size, geography or industry.

As part of the collaboration, Here will list its supply chain offerings that are used by T&L companies globally in AWS Marketplace, a curated digital catalogue that companies can use to find, buy, deploy and manage third-party software, data and services to run their businesses. Additionally, Here will work with AWS to bring to market capabilities for T&L participants to leverage, such as warehouse and yard management, predictive ETA calculations, and CO₂ fleet emission offerings.

Here builds on enterprise-grade map content and core location services such as APIs for traffic enabled routing, geofencing, geocoding and mobile SDKs. This helps companies connect and integrate data from multiple stakeholders in the transportation ecosystem to optimise planning, prediction of events, shipment ETAs and location-based analytics.

The offerings include:

• Asset Tracking delivers real-time visibility of asset location and status. Here leverages a platform-as-a-service model to enable businesses to track their assets seamlessly indoors and out. Businesses can reduce time and money spent on missing equipment and focus on optimising asset use and efficiency.

• Tour Planning creates cost- or time-optimised tours for all vehicles in a fleet, incorporating vehicle type and capacity, to increase use. The calculations reflect current traffic and use special truck-routing attributes, such as road, height and turn restrictions, when heavy vehicles are used.

• Last Mile is an end-to-end software-as-a-service (SaaS) application for managing last kilometre and urban deliveries. It comes with a web-planning dashboard, mobile driver app and real-time tracking for more accurate ETAs. Users can integrate with their existing order management and customer relationship management systems or use it standalone.

“The requirements for efficient tour planning are constantly growing in the transportation industry, corresponding to increased shipment volumes, complex planning processes and a shortage of skilled workers,” said Tobias Braun, IT project manager at Active Logistics. “Using Here Tour Planning, we have developed a comprehensive application that fully automates the transport planning process, with accurate traffic data, shipment prioritisation and delivery window compliance. This allows customers to reduce the time needed to plan hundreds of vehicles’ routes from several hours to just a few minutes.”

AWS is supporting Here’s location-based service applications to increase visibility across supply chains while tackling some of the largest challenges in T&L globally. The development roadmap includes extending asset visibility beyond transportation modes and into the yards and warehouses.

The aim is to enable tracking beyond containers, pallets and cages to monitoring the location and status of actual shipments. Here wants to increase the accuracy of predictive arrival and departure times across transportation modes with AI and ML, and provide services to measure fleet CO₂ emissions in compliance with global standards and to conduct what-if scenario planning for fleet transitions to alternative fuels and drive trains.

“At the centre of supply chain visibility is location intelligence,” said Edzard Overbeek, CEO at Here Technologies. “We have seen now that deep insights on the where and when dimensions of operations deliver tremendous value, from optimising inbound and outbound logistics to middle and last mile delivery execution. We are proud to work with AWS on deploying these cost and time saving solutions for companies to minimise dwell times, predict ETAs more accurately across every stage, and begin the crucial step of measuring fleet CO₂ emissions as the transition to EV vehicles accelerates and economies decarbonise.”

Bill Vass, vice president of AWS Engineering, added: “T&L companies around the world rely on real-time visibility for customer satisfaction and operational efficiency. When shipments do not arrive on time, or don’t arrive at all, someone’s bottom line is impacted. The AWS services for data management and aggregation power Here supply chain solutions, and are required for the most relevant customer data to be conflated with the latest location intelligence to solve the visibility and predictability problem throughout a supply chain.”

Here is a partner to customers across the ecosystem of shippers, 3PLs, 4PLs, freight forwarders and road carriers. Hundreds of companies within the transportation, logistics and mobility sectors use Here location data, software and technology to create fuel, time and cost saving applications.