IN Brief:
- Wakeo introduced Supply Chain Advisor on 3 November for shippers and freight forwarders.
- The product combines a customer’s shipment history with wider route-performance data to assess reliability, cost, and emissions.
- Recommendations are intended to inform freight tenders and business reviews while customers retain the final choice of carrier and route.
Wakeo has launched Supply Chain Advisor, an AI-based planning service intended to help shippers and freight forwarders choose transport routes and providers before entering new freight agreements. Introduced on 3 November, the system combines a customer’s historical shipments with wider multimodal performance information to compare available options by cost, reliability, and environmental considerations. It is available to customers now, extending Wakeo’s existing transport visibility services into the purchasing and planning decisions that determine how future cargo will move.
Freight tenders often compare quoted transport rates, while the cost of missed delivery windows may appear later through additional inventory, urgent replacement movements, detention, or demurrage. Supply Chain Advisor brings actual service performance into the same evaluation as price. A procurement team can therefore compare the quoted route with evidence of how similar services have performed, then apply the priorities of the freight programme in question. Wakeo describes the outcome as ranked recommendations for transport buyers, not automatic carrier awards or bookings.
The underlying comparison joins two datasets. Wakeo’s visibility platform records performance on the shipper’s own movements across sea, air, road, rail, and parcel services; Trusted Routes benchmarks route options against the wider market. Its models use millions of historical shipments to predict performance for the available combinations of route and provider. Users can weight cost, expected reliability, transit time, disruption exposure, and carbon dioxide emissions, allowing the same underlying services to be ranked differently when delivery requirements change.
A manufacturer evaluating a lane for components needed on a production schedule may give reliability a heavier weighting than a consignor moving less time-sensitive goods. The adviser first scores the existing transport plan, identifies routes that compare poorly against the chosen priorities, and proposes alternatives. Those proposals can then inform a tender or the next business review. Because the priorities are set by the customer, the system is designed to make the trade-offs visible rather than silently optimise for one measure across every shipment.
Loïc Marzin, Wakeo’s co-founder and chief technology officer, said the route models rank predicted performance against the priorities selected by each customer, with transport teams retaining the final decision. A model based on past movements can reveal systematic differences between carriers’ published transit times and observed arrivals, but it cannot on its own confirm that space will be available on a particular departure. The buyer must still establish service frequency, available capacity, cargo restrictions, and contractual terms before awarding business.
During a tender, the system can be used to test whether a cheaper rate remains attractive once likely delay and inventory effects are considered. Demurrage and detention represent different sources of exposure around terminal and equipment use, and neither follows automatically from every late arrival. By comparing operating history with route alternatives, procurement and logistics teams can focus negotiations on lanes where price and delivery performance are most likely to conflict. Wakeo has not published a quantified saving achieved by customers using the newly launched adviser.
The same records can also underpin carrier reviews after a contract begins. Actual journey times and exceptions on the shipper’s own flows can be compared with the market benchmark, revealing whether poor delivery performance is concentrated on particular services or reflects a wider port or corridor problem. A supplier performing poorly on one lane might remain competitive elsewhere, so the analysis is most useful when freight characteristics and measurement periods are comparable. Revised recommendations then feed into the next planning cycle rather than alter active shipments automatically.
Emissions estimates sit alongside those cost and timing measures. Choosing a transport mode, port combination, or service can change both journey duration and the associated carbon footprint, but a shorter route is not necessarily the lowest-emission option. Wakeo says teams can set emissions as a priority while examining the reliability and expense of alternatives. The product’s comparisons therefore provide a planning input; the appropriate outcome still depends on the shipper’s service commitments, available carriers, and emissions accounting basis.
Supply Chain Advisor extends two existing Wakeo services rather than replacing them. Real-time visibility provides shipment tracking, predictive arrival times, and performance analytics; Trusted Routes supplies market benchmarks for transit times, rates, reliability, and emissions. The new advisory layer uses the resulting data when selecting future routes and providers. It is intended to work with the spreadsheets and tendering systems companies already use, so adopting it does not require the company to delegate freight purchasing decisions to an autonomous system.
The adviser is available now to shippers and freight forwarders. Its performance will be tested when recommendations translate into booked services and the resulting deliveries can be measured against the predicted cost, transit time, and reliability. As routes and carrier networks change, the value of the comparison will also depend on how current and representative its underlying operational records remain.
