Supply Chain Visibility Product Specification Template

Start with the carriers that cover 80% of your shipment volume. For most companies, this is 3-5 carriers. Building 15 integrations in parallel is a recipe for delayed launches and brittle code. Get the top carriers working reliably, prove the value with your operations team, then expand.

For ocean freight, every 2-4 hours is effectively real-time since vessels report position via AIS at similar intervals. For domestic trucking, true real-time means sub-15-minute updates via ELD or GPS telematics. Match your refresh frequency to the actual cadence of the underlying data source rather than defaulting to "real-time" everywhere.

If you are tracking fewer than 10 carriers and have engineering bandwidth, direct integrations give you more control. If you need 50+ carriers quickly, consider platforms like project44 or FourKites that aggregate carrier data. The tradeoff is cost versus speed-to-market and ongoing maintenance burden.

Many smaller carriers still rely on EDI 214 or even email-based updates. Build an ingestion layer that normalizes data from multiple formats (API, EDI, flat file, email parsing) into a common event model. This abstraction layer prevents carrier-specific logic from leaking into your tracking and alerting systems.

Your visibility product should tie to a broader supply chain strategy. The strategy defines which capabilities matter most (cost reduction, risk mitigation, customer experience) and the visibility spec translates those priorities into features. Without strategic alignment, you risk building a tracking tool that nobody uses because it does not solve the problems the business actually cares about. ---