Over the past few years, visibility has become table stakes. Every platform claims to offer real-time tracking and dashboards packed with data. Yet operations teams are still firefighting, still scrambling to explain delays, and still missing service level agreements.
Nidhi Gupta, co-founder and CEO of Portcast, sees the problem clearly.
“Operators shouldn’t spend their days narrating problems or looking at datasets,” she said. “The data should be talking to them.”
Why traditional visibility isn’t enough
That shift from passive tracking to active intelligence is what separates Portcast from the crowded field of logistics visibility tools. While most platforms dump information into a dashboard and leave the interpretation to overwhelmed operators, Portcast aims to tell teams where issues are occurring, why they’re happening, and what actions to take before problems spiral out of control.
“Most legacy tools have a ton of data, but they still let the human operator interpret everything. The data is not connected enough, not timely enough, and not automatically interpreted to drive action,” Gupta said.
In short, traditional tracking tells you something happened. Predictive visibility tells you why it happened, what it means for your specific operation, and how you can respond both operationally and financially.
The bottom line impact of predictive visibility
The impact of predictive visibility becomes tangible when you look at how one customer used Portcast to solve a cash flow problem that had been hiding in plain sight.
The company ships perishable goods from Asia-Pacific to destinations around the world, and their payment terms are tied directly to cargo arrival dates. Consignees only receive invoices when shipments arrive. Inaccurate ETAs, however, meant invoices were going out at the wrong time. Send them too early, and consignees get frustrated. Send them too late, and it impacts cash flows and adds financial risk. What seemed like an operational tracking issue was actually bleeding into the company’s financial operations.
After implementing Portcast’s solution, the team finally had reliable ETAs and a clearer context into why delays were happening. The customer integrated that intelligence into both their operational and financial workflows. The change was immediately evident. Internal disputes and customer frustrations around invoicing “just went away.” Leadership could finally stop firefighting and focus on growth.
“What used to take up to two full meetings per week is now resolved in about five to ten minutes,” Gupta said.
Supply chain risks every team faces
Gupta breaks supply chain risk into three buckets. First is operational risk. This includes carrier actions such as port skips, blank sailings, and rollovers. Second is external risk. These come from events outside anyone’s control, including typhoons, geopolitical tensions, strikes, and port congestion. Third is financial risk. These are costs that can be avoided, such as overpayments, duplicate charges, and unnecessary spending.
When Typhoon Ragasa hit the South China Sea recently, Portcast alerted customers about delayed shipments, impacted trade lanes, and carrier schedules likely to miss their transit time plans. That advance warning gave Portcast customers time to notify their end customers, replan future shipments, and adapt on the fly.
Predictive visibility in practice
Gupta shared a story that illustrates just how unpredictable ocean shipping can be. A customer shipped a container from Jakarta to Vancouver. The vessel crossed the Pacific and stopped at Tacoma, just one port before its destination. Then things got weird. The vessel skipped Vancouver entirely, sailed back across the Pacific to Busan, Korea, and sat there for eleven days before the carrier found another vessel to finally complete the journey to Vancouver. Transit time doubled.
With predictive visibility, the customer could have known the vessel might skip Vancouver before it happened. They could have unloaded at Tacoma and trucked the shipment north, or, once the container was rerouted to Busan, they could have identified an earlier vessel rather than waiting nearly two weeks for the carrier to figure things out.
In another case, Portcast helped a customer discover that their carrier choice between Hamburg and Durban was taking 70 days via Malaysia, when direct services would take only 30 to 40 days.
“Through understanding what operational issues are there, we’re able to then use technology to say, ‘Please see if you can switch the carrier, here are alternate options,” Gupta explained.
The touchless future
When asked to describe the future of the supply chain in one word, Gupta chose “touchless.” And she insists it’s not some distant vision.
“Touchless supply chains aren’t futuristic,” she said. “They’re inevitable.”
AI is already digitizing shipping documents with high accuracy, regardless of language or format. It’s reading millions of web pages to identify and classify supply chain risks. It enables fully touchless auditing of freight documents that previously required freight analysts or outsourced teams. This offers freight analysts a massive reduction of manual tasks, saving them time and making their work more efficient.
Progressive companies are now measuring what percentage of their supply chain operations are touchless today and setting targets for the next one to two years. They’re tracking how much of their work won’t be done in a repetitive manual way.
Portcast emerged from Gupta’s own experience working at a large logistics company across Asia. Shippers wanted better control towers and visibility, but the manual effort required to set them up remained a massive barrier
“There’s a lot of inefficiency, which I see as an opportunity, in the supply chain that we can leverage technology for,” she said.
The mission is clear: Make logistics efficient, touchless, and eventually self-adjusting. It starts with data that doesn’t just sit there waiting to be interpreted but actively drives the decisions that keep supply chains moving.
Click here to explore how Portcast brings intelligence into visibility.
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