RADAR Tool Allows Cleo Customers to Improve Customer Relationships with Real-Time SLA Resolution

It’s no secret that supply chain disruption has run rampant these past few years and only seems to get more complex with every passing global event. In these times, it’s fascinating how for some trailblazing companies, ecosystem integration technology is helping them fundamentally rethink supply-chain performance, exceed trading-partner expectations, and drive newfound profitability.

Earlier this year, Cleo, the pioneer and global leader of the Ecosystem Integration software category and provider of the Cleo Integration Cloud (CIC) platform, launched CIC Cockpit with RADARTM (Real-Time Analytics, Data-Driven Action & Results), the industry’s first integration-driven business insights framework. RADAR uniquely provides supply chain-driven companies with forward-looking intelligence and real-time status updates on their key business commitments – allowing organizations to proactively manage their KPIs, delivery promises, customer expectations, and SLAs before any of them become at-risk or problematic.

Scores of Cleo’s 4,100+ manufacturing, logistics, and distribution customers, including Omni Logistics, Arrive Logistics, Brother International, Ripple Junction, and many others, are successfully leveraging this new product innovation, CIC Cockpit with RADAR, to elevate their supply chain agility by ensuring they meet and surpass revenue-critical business commitments they’ve established with their ecosystem trading partners.

“Cleo’s CIC Cockpit with RADAR has provided us stronger real-time visibility and brought actionable insights to our customers’ supply chains. We’ve strategically built our company around the needs of our customers, and our latest investment in RADAR was an answer to a need for stronger visibility and has led to stronger results. RADAR brings us intelligent notifications whenever we’re at risk for on-time completion, enabling us to act on those insights in real time,” said Troy Washburn, vice president, Customer Solutions & Data Management at Omni Logistics. “Having these actionable insights in advance has brought a degree of trust and reliance on our brand that has strengthened our ecosystem relationships. This, of course, translates into direct control to measure, report, and act on time-sensitive events.”

Trust is key in every business relationship. RADAR empowers businesses to be bullish about their business commitments – giving them the ability to dynamically sense and intelligently respond before promises go unmet. These business commitments consist of expectations, contractual agreements, or defined SLAs across inbound and outbound transactions within an organization’s ecosystem. Now, organizations can get proactive alerts whenever they are at risk for missing any internal or external commitment or business plan, including order volumes, order acknowledgements, load tender volumes, status updates, inventory updates, shipment notifications, and invoicing, among other critical KPIs.

Mahesh Rajasekharan, CEO of Cleo, said, “Supply chains today are 100% customer expectations driven. Companies that fail to dynamically sense and intelligently respond to business commitments stand to not only lose revenue and get hit with chargebacks, but also lose trust that damages brand relationships. To deliver operational precision and meet increasingly challenging customer expectations, companies need to take control over KPIs and customer promises, so they can uncover and address at-risk commitments faster. By enabling teams to take proactive course corrections, Cleo is helping organizations close the feedback loop to optimize end-to-end business processes by surfacing actionable insights they never previously had access to.”

The initial launch of CIC Cockpit with RADAR in February 2022 provided “event-based” capabilities so companies could configure and monitor SLAs in terms of response times to specific events, such as sending an acknowledgement after receiving an order or a response to a load tender request.

Enhancements to RADAR in this release specifically address a company’s “expected” transaction volumes, enabling users to define expectations and set risk tolerances for transactions across their supply chain, specifically those related to order-to-cash, procure-to-pay, or load-tender-to-invoice business processes.

These new additions to CIC Cockpit with RADAR bring three self-service configuration options that empower users to define and set expectations to better control their ecosystem trading partner commitments:

■ Expected volume by a specific time
■ Expected volume between two points of time
■ Expected volume over a defined period

In each case, users can configure transactional and business expectations alike, subscribe to email alerts, and quickly move from insights to action. By tracking and monitoring expectations’ status, organizations are set up to deliver mutually beneficial outcomes to trading partners.

The ability to proactively manage these expectations results in better forecasting, improved relationships with key trading partners, elimination of penalties, and protection of customer score cards.