Wolfgang Lehmacher and Mikael Lind discuss the recent launch of project44’s Movement platform.
It is not every day that a supply chain technology heavyweight announces a new game. But that is what happened when Chicago-based project44 introduced its latest platform, the next-generation Movement. The press release promised a “Decision Intelligence Platform” that would automate and orchestrate global supply chains with a flick of an AI wand. But how does it stack up against alternatives, and how does it fit into the messy, fragmented reality of global supply chains and shipping?
With the new Movement with Decision Intelligence, project44 is promising to go beyond seeing where your box is to tell you what to do about it, and in some cases, do it for you. AI agents clean up messy data, spot disruptions, and even book or reroute shipments. Ford, Eaton, Home Depot, Magna—big names are already singing its praises, with stories of fewer “where’s my order?” calls and comforting on-time delivery stats.
Movement is a proprietary platform. It is project44 that is in control, and you are along for the ride. That is fine if you are a Fortune 500 shipper with a global footprint and a healthy IT budget. But what about the rest of the industry—the small and mid-sized forwarders, the inland terminals, the ports in emerging markets? Enter the Virtual Watch Tower, or VWT, a very different “democratic” beast that has quietly been making waves from Singapore to Scandinavia.
VWT is not a product you buy; it is a public digital backbone, built by the industry for the industry. Born in the shadow of TradeLens’s demise, VWT was designed from the ground up as a federated, neutral platform, governed by neutral research institutes in Europe and Asia: RISE, A*STAR’s IHPC, VTT, and TalTech. The plan is to transfer the approach and tools to a to-be-established charity with a two-tier governance structure, developed by experts at Gothenburg University. The solution developed is VWTnet, scheduled to go live in 2026. What is VWT’s secret sauce? Ports, carriers, customs, and even driver-owner operators get access to the same real-time truth, not a filtered version provided by a single vendor.
The difference is not just philosophical; it is practical. Take the Oulu-to-Australia case: a shipment of Finnish timber hits a storm, threatening to miss its transhipment in Zeebrugge. In the old world, each party would scramble in isolation, emails and messages flying. With VWT, everyone from the ship’s captain to the port operators can see the same disruption alert, the same ETA, and the same recommendation. The captain speeds up, the port adjusts its window, and the cargo makes its connection.
So, does Movement make VWT obsolete? Hardly. If anything, the two are natural complements. VWT is the open plumbing, the shared language, the neutral ground where data flows. Movement is the AI-powered control tower and workflow engine. Plug Movement into VWT, and you get the best of both worlds: rich, trusted data and the tools to act on it.
The lesson? The future belongs to platforms that can play nicely with others, bridging the gap between proprietary innovation and public infrastructure. Movement is probably a step forward, but it is not the only step the industry needs.
Ultimately, the supply chain is too large, too complex, and too critical for any single company to control significant portions of it. The real revolution will come not from a single platform, but from the connective tissue that lets them all work together. Watch this space.
