The Challenge
Arrow's inbound supply chain runs on data from hundreds of suppliers and 15 core transportation providers, across multiple business units and warehouse management systems. The company has offices in more than 85 countries, 260 sales locations and 41 fulfillment and value centers. Before FourKites, visibility began only after goods were already moving.
Supplier compliance was judged on third-party freight-paid data that was 30 to 60 days old by the time it arrived. The team could describe last quarter's problems but could not intervene in this week's. Commercial invoices, packing lists, booking confirmations and bills of lading did not arrive consistently from suppliers and forwarders, and a missing document often meant a missing shipment. Customs brokers keyed part numbers, HTS codes and quantities from scanned documents with no check against open purchase orders, which led to post-entry corrections and incorrect duty. In Mexico, Arrow absorbed brokerage delays of six to 10 days.
Shared mailboxes in every region took in a steady stream of questions about where shipments were, and answering each one meant a person going to look.
Our Solution
Arrow chose to work with the data it already generated instead of forcing a new system onto a supplier base it does not control. The FourKites Intelligent Control Tower (ICT) became the operating picture, spanning supplier operations, inbound purchase orders, inter-warehouse movements and stock transfers, and outbound delivery to end customers worldwide, including Arrow's global supply chain services business.
Sam, the FourKites supplier operations agent, handles the documents. Arrow co-developed Sam with FourKites as a purpose-built agent that knows what to look for in a bill of lading, booking confirmation, packing list and commercial invoice. It reads the emails, reports and documents suppliers already send, extracts the data and creates shipments that Arrow's own systems would have missed. Arrow can tune how Sam recognizes different supplier formats and applies regional requirements, and Sam handles complex documents such as a 50-page commercial invoice.
Supporting workflows include a central mailbox for supplier and forwarder prealerts, notification rules that push exceptions to the people who own them, and Broker Connect and Foreign Trade Zone reporting that gives customs brokers purchase order and in-transit data already reconciled between Arrow, its forwarders and the platform. Scheduled reports with payer and trade-zone filters put compliance and duty views in front of the right people without anyone running a query.
Arrow tracks one north-star metric, order-to-shipment linkage, and is building dashboards that trace where each linkage came from. Adoption ran as its own workstream, with regional super users, a role-based curriculum in Arrow's learning system, a standing steering committee and a weekly executive cadence with FourKites.
The Result
Arrow is partway through a multi-year inbound transformation and chose to build the data foundation before claiming a return, so the outcomes so far are structural. For the first time, inbound purchase orders, inter-warehouse movements, stock transfers and outbound shipments sit in one operating picture across all three regions.
Supplier compliance management moved from retrospective reports built on 30-to-60-day-old freight data to near-real-time visibility, so the team can intervene while a problem is still correctable. Sam consolidates the collection and processing of supplier documents, and exception handling is shifting from shared mailboxes to platform notifications. An internal analysis estimates that Foreign Trade Zone operations save about 1.5 hours a day through FourKites reporting and supporting data work.
Arrow expects further gains in expedite costs, inventory buffers, import compliance and tariff-risk management as adoption and data quality mature.
We're also leveraging FourKites shipment data to reduce manual effort within our Foreign Trade Zone operations.
