Written By: Faruk Olawale Quadri, Co-Founder and COO, Circuit 40s
I have worked directly in procurement and supply chain industry. I’ve seen the efforts and weight the custom workers, trucking companies, freight forwarders, and others bear in their journeys across international trade routes. Well, these frequent movements I’ve experienced have made me figure out a wide gap that’s not being filled in the shipment processes.
This is an information gap. It makes the movement of shipments stay still even while the operators are available and ready to move. I’ve experienced the stalling of a shipment for two days at the port because of a wrong email that was sent. The freight forwarder kept looking out for updates, but all was to no avail. Everyone was waiting, yet not a single soul could fathom the reason for the wait, including the warehouse team. Everyone that could mechanically make the shipment move was available, but the lack of an ecosystem of shared digital environment connecting everyone made things impossible. This experience alone shuffled in my memories a mess.
No one would actually imagine the fragments of coordination of international shipments and how tiny they could be, literally. Just one single shipment that passes from one country to another experiences multiple independent operators. The role of the freight forwarder is to be in charge of booking, while the customs brokers are the ones in charge of clearance. Trucking companies are saddled with the role of moving cargos inland. While a warehouse is kept in store for a temporary moment, a last-mile provider enables the delivery to the final destination.
It becomes so tedious because these operators have no means of linking together for shared communication. They are only bound over emails, WhatsApp, phone calls, and spreadsheets. In some cases, documents get missing in inboxes, and that same information is re-entered into different systems by five different people. It gets hard and crazy whenever one operator becomes slow to confirm, as it makes every operator downstream become stranded.
As of 2024, the global logistics market is valued at $9.3 trillion, and annually, bad data and fragmented communication cost the industry more than $600 billion. These are numbers that are alarming, and that’s not the end. The disruptions of the supply chain alone cost organizations $184 billion annually. In a time of modern technology.
There is so much effort oftentimes in tracking stalled shipments, but the root problem is not being spoken about. Logistics technology and this conversation should go beyond that. Communication is important, and the model, which connects operators, manages handoffs between them, and also sequences their work, should make each party have a share in the information at the exact appropriate time. It is so sad that this system isn’t in place and keeps costing the industry billions every single year. It would be surprising to note that this is not really a technology issue, as the technology exists, but the lack of digital coordination creates this gap. Isolated parties would do the industry a big harm, and communicating over channels that are already disconnected will do it bigger harm.
This means a lot to global trade, as a stalled shipment that is meant to move across countries and time zones makes production have a “K leg,” cripples delivery commitments, makes businesses run out of plans, and enables more mounting costs for international trade. So, it is far beyond the coordination gap. It affects the world in general. It is essential that importers across Africa, Asia, the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East, where many operators across many countries must find diverse means to coordinate effortlessly, as their coasts are powerful trade nooks and crannies of the world at large. They are portals to global trade, and again, systems should work out.
The data problem finds itself hinged to the root cause of the coordination gap as it becomes very difficult for operators to connect because there is a lack of a shared digital platform that holds the shipment data, makes the workflow easy, and is also accessible to every party at due time. In an attempt to solve this, the industry needs a digital coordination platform that assigns operators based on capability and route coverage, manages handoffs without requiring manual confirmation, and stores every document and update in a single environment accessible to every party in real time. This is no longer just a logistics operations problem. It is a software and systems structural issue. The goal is to weave disconnected systems into a single coordinated digital workflow.
When this is in place, the effects are clear. Fewer delays at ports, less energy waste in warehousing, better route coordination, and less duplication across the chain. Closing the coordination gap would directly reduce the wasteful scale of international freight.
It should be noted, again, that the proper coordination of the shipments between operators and an automatically controlled digital environment where every party has full knowledge of what is going on in the entire journey is key, not just tracking tools. This is the structure needed. When the system is put in place, operators stop worrying over an expected WhatsApp message or chat. Documents start to get very safe, and the loss of $600 billion annually in the industry reduces and stops. This is the urgent issue that needs to be solved as there is an increment in growth and the complexity of international supply chains. The time to build that digital system that weaves together operators is now.
Sources
- Global logistics market valued at $9.3 trillion in 2024
Transparency Market Research — Logistics Market Size and Forecast 2025 to 2035
- Bad, inaccurate, or missing data costs companies more than $600 billion globally per year — The Data Warehousing Institute, cited by Trax Technologies, ‘The High Cost of Bad Data in Supply Chain Management.’ traxtech.com/blog/the-high-cost-of-bad-data-in-supply-chain-management
The Data Warehousing Institute, cited across multiple industry publications
- 90% of data extraction and entry in logistics still occurs manually
Billentis Report 2019, The E-Invoicing Journey 2019 to 2025
- Supply chain disruptions cost organisations $184 billion annually
Swiss Re, cited in the J.S. Held Global Risk Report 2025
Faruk Olawale Quadri is Co-Founder and COO of Circuit 40s Ltd, a UK-registered digital technology company headquartered in Sheffield building coordination infrastructure for international logistics. He leads product development and operator network design across a growing global network of verified logistics nodes. www.Circuit40s.com
