It's 10 O'Clock on sunday night—do you know where your raw materials, parts, components and sub-assemblies are? That shipment of motors from Taiwan? The load of automotive frame parts bound for the Port of Oakland that you'll need a week from Thursday on a just-in-time basis? How about those disk drives and capacitors your materials chief ordered from a new supplier in China for your finished-goods assembly plant? Chances are, if yours are among the billions of dollars worth of goods crossing the Pacific Ocean—or any ocean, for that matter—you're not sure where your cargo is. The reason is that not even the most technologically savvy shippers and third-party logistics firms track materials once they've hit the high seas.
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