When most people in the industry talk about “visibility,” they’re talking about Real-Time Transportation Visibility Platforms (#RTTvP). Container tracking. Vessel ETAs. Drayage milestones. That’s the default narrative.

But here’s the problem: RTTvP is only one thin slice of what visibility should mean for an importer. Focusing on it alone misses the bigger picture. Visibility is not about watching a container crawl across the Pacific; it’s about understanding your supply chain as a living system, across processes, data, and connections.

In this issue, I want to unpack what real visibility looks like. We’ll move beyond RTTvP and break visibility down into three critical dimensions:

• Process visibility – knowing what’s supposed to happen at every step, and whether it is happening.
• Data visibility – seeing not just the data itself, but its completeness, accuracy, and consistency across perspectives.
• Connectivity visibility – visibility that emerges when data is linked across objects, functions, and systems, revealing the relationships that drive supply chain execution.

Together, these three layers form the foundation of what I’ll call multi-dimensional visibility. It’s the difference between seeing dots on a map, and truly understanding your supply chain.

The RTTvP Mirage

Let’s start with RTTvP, since that’s where most conversations about visibility begin. Platforms like FourKites, Inc. , project44, and VIZION focus on one core problem: “Where’s my container?”

They provide carrier feeds, AIS vessel tracking, drayage milestones, and predictive ETAs. It’s not useless—location matters. But it’s also shallow. Knowing that your container is “somewhere between Shenzhen and Long Beach” is not the same as knowing if your customs entry is filed, if your delivery appointment is secured, or if your supplier actually shipped the right goods in the first place.

RTTvP delivers transportation visibility, not supply chain visibility. And because the industry has equated the two, companies have over-invested in RTTvP and under-invested in the deeper, more consequential dimensions of visibility.

Process Visibility: Seeing What’s Supposed to Happen

Process visibility is about clarity: what should be happening at each stage of the supply chain, and whether it is happening.

Ask yourself: do you know, today, across all of your imports—

• Which POs have confirmed ready dates?
• Which ASNs have been filed?
• Which customs entries are accepted, and which are stuck in CBP review?
• Which shipments have valid delivery orders in place at the terminal?

These aren’t transportation questions. They’re process questions. They reflect whether the supply chain is operating as designed. Without this visibility, you’re blind to exceptions until they blow up into real costs—demurrage, stockouts, expediting fees, customer chargebacks.

True process visibility requires a system that not only records milestones, but understands the intended sequence of events, validates them, and highlights deviations. It’s not about where the container is. It’s about whether the work is getting done.

Here’s a concrete example: imagine you’ve got a shipment scheduled to deliver into your DC on July 15. RTTvP shows the container is on a vessel, and that vessel is running exactly on time. From RTTvP’s perspective, everything looks fine. But upstream, the supplier missed the original CY cutoff and the container was quietly rolled to the next vessel.

From a transportation perspective, nothing is “late.” The vessel is sailing on schedule. But from a process perspective, the shipment is already a week behind. That roll means the container will now arrive too late to make its drayage appointment, which means it will miss the DC delivery slot, which means your customer order allocation can’t be met.

RTTvP will never surface this risk because it can’t know what the plan was. Without visibility into the intended vessel, cutoff dates, promised-by dates, and downstream dependencies, you only find out once the damage is irreversible.

That’s the difference: RTTvP shows you whether a ship is on time. Process visibility shows you whether your supply chain is on time. And it’s the only way to answer the crucial question: “Which of my shipments are off the rails—or at risk of going off the rails?”

Data Visibility: Seeing the Data Itself

The second dimension is data visibility. This isn’t about whether data exists in a database. It’s about whether it’s visible in a way that’s reliable, consistent, and usable across functions.

Here’s the reality most importers live in: product data lives in ERP, trade content lives in GTS, shipment data lives in TMS, and financial data lives in a billing system. Each of these systems has partial truth, but none of them carries the full context. Worse, they don’t agree. One system says the PO line is 100 units, another says 95, a third shows 90 received. Which one is “right”?

Data visibility means more than access. It means confidence. Confidence that:

• Product classifications (HTS, ECCN, country of origin) are correct and consistent.
• Financial costs (duties, freight, accessorials) are allocated properly to the right POs and SKUs.
• Documents (invoices, packing lists, bills of lading) are complete, reconciled, and aligned.

Without data visibility, you can’t run landed cost analysis, you can’t guarantee compliance, and you certainly can’t make reliable commitments to your customers.

Connectivity Visibility: Seeing the Links

The third, and most overlooked, dimension is connectivity visibility. It’s the visibility that emerges not from the data itself, but from the way data is connected.

A PO is just a PO until it’s connected to a shipment. A shipment is just a container until it’s connected to the customs entry. A customs entry is just a form until it’s connected to the invoice. Visibility happens when these connections are explicit, systematic, and queryable.

Think of it as a supply chain graph. Each node (PO, shipment, SKU, document, cost) connects to others, forming a web of relationships. When the connections are visible, you can answer questions like:

• Which POs are in this shipment, and which SKUs within those POs?
• Which customs entries are tied to these shipments, and are the duties allocated correctly?
• Which freight invoices correspond to which bills of lading, and do the charges match the contracted rates?

Connectivity visibility is what turns isolated data into an operational system. It’s the difference between having files in a folder and having an actual supply chain platform.

Why This Matters

The difference between RTTvP visibility and multi-dimensional visibility isn’t academic. It’s existential for importers.

Consider the costs: demurrage, detention, incorrect duty payments, expediting, inventory carrying costs, compliance penalties. Each of these is a failure of visibility—but not in the RTTvP sense. They are failures of process visibility (a DO wasn’t filed in time), data visibility (HTS was misclassified), or connectivity visibility (freight invoice wasn’t reconciled with shipment milestones).

RTTvP helps you answer “Where is my stuff?” Multi-dimensional visibility helps you answer “Is my supply chain operating as intended?” And more importantly: “Which of my shipments are about to fail?”

One prevents a late phone call. The other prevents millions in hidden costs.

Why Most Companies Fail at This

Why is it that almost every importer has invested in RTTvP, but almost none have true multi-dimensional visibility? Two reasons:

• Systems are built in silos. ERP, TMS, WMS, and trade compliance tools all manage their own fragments of data. None of them manage the supply chain as a whole.
• No common control objects. Most companies lack the critical organizing objects—like the Shipment and the Transaction-Product—that allow data to be connected across functions. Without these, visibility collapses into disjointed snapshots.

The result: companies are data-rich but visibility-poor. They can track a container’s longitude and latitude, but they can’t tell you which SKUs are inside it, whether duties were paid correctly, or whether the shipment will actually deliver to the customer on time.

The 3rdwave Perspective

At 3rdwave , we define visibility differently. To us, visibility is the product of process control + data integrity + connectivity. That’s why we’ve built our platform not just as another tracking tool, but as an operational system that:

• Manages shipments as the central control object, with full journey milestones.
• Links transaction-products (specific SKUs on specific shipments) so costs, compliance, and timing are all tied to the right level of granularity.
• Provides process visibility by validating every step: PO confirmation, ASN filing, customs clearance, delivery order, warehouse receipt.
• Delivers data visibility by ingesting and reconciling POs, invoices, packing lists, bills of lading, customs entries.
• Enables connectivity visibility by linking it all together—so a PO line in SAP is connected to a container, to a customs entry, to an invoice, to a warehouse receipt.

That’s what real visibility looks like. It’s not dots on a map. It’s a nervous system for your supply chain.

The Future of Visibility

The next decade of supply chain tech will be defined not by how well we track vessels, but by how well we integrate processes, data, and connections. Importers who stop at RTTvP will remain reactive, always chasing containers. Importers who invest in multi-dimensional visibility will be proactive, controlling outcomes.

Visibility isn’t about watching. It’s about knowing. It’s about being confident that your supply chain is doing what it’s supposed to do. And that requires moving beyond RTTvP.

RTTvP answers “Where is my container?” Multi-dimensional visibility answers “Is my supply chain working?” and “Which shipments are off the rails?”

One is tracking. The other is control.

The industry needs to stop confusing the two.