FourKites & Chorus launch digital twins for supply chains

FourKites and Chorus have formed a strategic partnership intended to provide enterprises with enhanced supply chain visibility and digital inventory management.

The collaboration integrates Chorus' item-level sensors and artificial intelligence-powered orchestration tools with the FourKites Intelligent Control Tower platform, which together create digital twins combining real-time supply chain events with granular package insights. The partnership aims to reduce inventory carrying costs, prevent stockouts and overstock, mitigate theft and damages, optimise safety stock levels, and improve service performance.

According to research from IHL Group, inventory distortion currently costs companies $1.77 trillion annually. Traditional tracking systems have struggled to provide real-time, granular information at the package or SKU level, leading to costly inefficiencies. The partnership seeks to address these gaps by leveraging advanced technology for more accurate and timely inventory monitoring.

Chorus' Seeker labels generate item-level data on the condition and location of goods, offering the foundation for AI-driven inventory management that covers not just inventory at rest but also goods in transit. Meanwhile, Chorus' Trip Intelligence system extends visibility into ongoing fulfilment, providing asset-level estimated arrival times and real-time anomaly detection to help prevent delays or losses.

By combining Chorus' sensing technologies and real-time analytics with FourKites' supply chain network and digital shipment twins, businesses can access what the companies describe as a "unified view of their supply chain" with improved accuracy, consistency, and reduced latency compared to existing tracking systems.

Through the alliance, FourKites will launch two new modules within its Intelligent Control Tower. The first, Precision Inventory Twin, will enable real-time digital representation of physical inventory, including condition tracking. The second, Dynamic Inventory Orchestration, uses AI to automatically optimise where inventory is kept, reduce waste, and lower working capital requirements, all while targeting improved service levels.

Mathew Elenjickal, Founder and Chief Executive Officer at FourKites, said: "For decades, companies have tried to solve inventory problems with software that can't accurately represent what's happening in the physical world. With Chorus, we're creating a dynamic digital twin of inventory in motion and at rest, enabling our AI engines to not just recommend better decisions, but autonomously execute them."

The partnership's initial focus addresses two critical segments. The first is critical goods inventory management for sectors such as pharmaceuticals, high technology, and medical devices. In these industries, disconnected systems and inaccurate data have resulted in either over-supply or frequent stockouts, both with significant cost implications. The second segment is consigned inventory management for firms with substantial capital tied up in stock, where losses from product expiry and unnecessary buffer stocks can reach tens to hundreds of millions of currency units annually.

Customers who implement the joint solution are expected to benefit from reduced product loss and waste through condition monitoring, lower safety stock levels while retaining service quality, improvements to working capital, automated inventory balancing and optimisation, and greater supply chain resilience via predictive disruption management.

Suresh Vishnubhatla, Chief Executive Officer at Chorus, commented: "The future of the supply chain is autonomous, but autonomy requires the fusion of physical and digital worlds and properly informed ML models. By combining Chorus' item-level visibility and highly granular ML models with FourKites' AI-powered automations, we're creating a nervous system for the modern supply chain that can react and optimise without human intervention."

The partnership comes at a time when supply chain volatility and complexity are challenging companies globally. Research from McKinsey suggests that digitising supply chains could reduce operational costs by up to 30% and decrease inventories by as much as 75%.

The first integrated modules from FourKites and Chorus' alliance will be available for select customers in the second quarter of 2025, with broader general availability planned for the third quarter of the same year.