Choosing a Cargo Tracking Company: Questions Your Logistics Tracking System Cannot Answer
A logistics tracking system shows you a map. It pings every hour or so. It flashes a colour when something goes wrong. What it does not show you is what happens when something actually goes wrong at 2 am on a Sunday. Or what the renewal price looks like in year three. Or whether the company behind the dashboard will still be around when your contract comes up again.
That part falls on the cargo tracking company. And that part deserves a closer look than most procurement teams give it.
The dashboard is the easy bit.
Most tools in logistics tracking systems demo well. Pretty maps, clean alerts, neat charts. You can spend an hour on a sales call and walk away thinking they all do the same thing.
They do not.
According to the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals‘ State of Logistics Report 2024, the logistics costs of US businesses were estimated to be $2.3 trillion. A fraction of the total will go toward solutions that may have worked during the proof of concept but failed when scaled. The dashboard is just a veneer. What happens behind it often carries more weight.
So ask harder questions early.
Questions worth asking before you sign
Here are a few that rarely make it onto a standard RFP. They probably should.
- Who answers the phone when a tracker stops reporting on a Saturday night
- What is the consequence if the company is acquired or ceases to exist
- How does the update for firmware work, and whether any device recall process is required
- How is the cost of loss in transit covered, and what are the conditions?
- What is the retrieval rate for reusable hardware in your existing customer base?
- How is your network coverage verified in countries with weak telecoms?
Some answers will surprise you. A few will be vague enough to be a red flag on their own.
Support is where the relationship lives.
A vendor with a 24-hour helpdesk in one timezone is a different proposition from one with regional support. Cargo does not respect office hours. Neither do theft attempts.
Ask for sample response times from real incidents. Ask how many customers a single account manager handles. Ask whether escalations go through a portal or a person.
Data ownership and exit clauses
What will happen to two years’ worth of shipping data when you change vendors? The majority of agreements fail to state clear details.
The answers to these three questions need to be crystal clear.
The shipment data is fully yours. It is always possible to download and utilise the shipment data.
The European Data Protection Board has issued guidance on logistics-related data flows under GDPR. It is worth reading the fine print yourself rather than trusting a sales summary.
What separates a vendor from a partner
A vendor sells you devices. A partner notices when your retrieval rate dips and asks why. A partner flags a route where coverage is patchy. A partner shares lessons from other customers in your sector without breaching their confidentiality.
You can usually tell the difference within the first three months. The dashboard looks the same. The relationship does not.
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