Why a pair of shoes has better visibility than a full container of raw materials
You can track a pair of shoes from a warehouse in Shenzhen to your doorstep in real-time, complete with delivery notifications and precise arrival windows. Yet try to monitor a $50,000 shipment of raw materials traveling from South Korea to a manufacturing facility in Sydney, and you enter a world of spreadsheets and bulk emails. This visibility gap reveals a fundamental flaw in how the chemical industry manages its supply chain.
The stakes are high. An average manufacturer juggles 50 to 400 open orders from dozens of suppliers simultaneously. One delayed shipment can halt production lines, trigger costly inventory rushes, or force manufacturers to reformulate products on the fly.
Yet the tools manufacturers have available to track these critical, valuable shipments remain stubbornly primitive. Most resort to Excel spreadsheets updated manually, then send out bulk emails to suppliers asking "is this delivery still on track?".
ChemCloud's data reveals that the demand for visibility on delivery status is greater in B2B than in the consumer world. In the consumer world, a customer will check a delivery page on average twice per delivery. Manufacturers using Chemcloud check the tracking page 4.1 times for a local delivery, and up to 8 times for a shipment coming from overseas. This behavior is reflective of the operational necessity of up to date information.
Despite the need for information, suppliers in the chemical industry rarely give customers a place to track their deliveries. At best, suppliers will send a confirmation email with an ETA, and a second email when shipped. In the absence of a tracking page, customers are forced to contact customer service, who then chase internal logistics teams for updates they should already possess. While these suppliers have often invested heavily in sophisticated inventory management systems, they leave customers completely in the dark about delivery progress.
Some suppliers do offer customer portals with shipment tracking, but these create their own problems. Manufacturers face the Sisyphean task of logging into dozens of different systems—each with unique interfaces and authentication requirements—just to check order status. The cure becomes worse than the disease: instead of sending twenty emails, procurement teams must navigate twenty separate portals.
Transparency as competitive advantage
The solution lies not in more sophisticated logistics but in exposing this information to customers. A unified tracking system would enable manufacturers to plan production with confidence whilst reducing the administrative burden on supplier account teams.
The benefits extend beyond operational efficiency. In an industry where relationships matter enormously, suppliers who provide superior visibility signal reliability and customer focus.
Using AI to transform email updates into a structured tracker
AI-powered procurement platforms like ChemCloud are solving this problem in two ways. First, manufacturers using ChemCloud can bring structure and automation to the chaos. Multiple users are able to track deliveries in one place using sophisticated software that triages incoming deliveries. Custom-built AI can read supplier delivery updates, and ensure the information is up to date.
Second, suppliers can ‘plug in’ to this network, providing live updates from their system to a place where the customer is already managing their procurement, as well as certificates of analysis and other documents required to go ahead with production.
In a world where consumers expect to track a $20 purchase across continents, industrial buyers will no longer tolerate being blind to million-dollar shipments.
ChemCloud's delivery tracker brings structure to the chaos
Interested in learning more about automating your delivery tracking? Get in touch with the ChemCloud team here.
