Global logistics has become defined by a fundamental paradox: Like many of the world’s critical commercial functions, the sector is caught between two worlds, the analog past and digital future.
Global logistics is one of the most operationally sophisticated industries underpinning commerce, coordinating ships, planes, trucks, ports, warehouses, customs authorities, and retailers across continents. But at its core, global supply chains remain stubbornly fragmented, propped up by spreadsheets, phone calls, manual reconciliations, and systems that were never designed to talk to one another.
“Everybody has their own systems. All the systems are disparate, they’re not connected. And asking something simple as like, ‘Where is my stuff? Where is my shipment?’ is virtually impossible to do from a single source,” David Marshall, COO at Moddule, told PYMNTS.
Solving for this thorny issue was the genesis behind Cory+, a new, AI-integrated supply chain control platform delivering end-to-end visibility, recently launched by Moddule and Cory Brothers, the global logistics and shipping firm.
Moddule, a data unification platform founded by logistics veterans, is betting that progress does not require ripping out legacy systems or imposing a single “source of truth” on an industry allergic to standardization. Instead, its approach is pragmatic: unify what already exists, connect what was never meant to connect, and deliver intelligence at the customer interface where it matters most.
As it stands today, “A simple phone call to say, ‘Hey, where’s my shipment?’ triggers a reaction,” Marshall explained, cascading through emails, calls and manual lookups.
Cory+ short-circuits that chain. By predicting arrival times, flagging delays, and issuing alerts, it allows customers to act sooner, and sometimes avoid costly disruptions altogether.
March Toward a Intelligent Supply Chain
Supply chain shocks over the past five years, from pandemic shutdowns to port congestion, labor strikes, and geopolitical disruption, have exposed how little real-time visibility many companies actually have into the movement of their goods.
The challenge is not a lack of data. Shipping lines, airlines, truckers, ports and warehouses all generate enormous volumes of information. The problem is that each actor does so within its own technical silo, using its own identifiers, formats and interfaces. Tracking a single shipment often requires checking dozens of portals, reconciling conflicting timestamps, and relying on human interpretation to fill in the gaps.
Data aggregators have attempted to solve part of this problem, but Marshall argued that most stop short of addressing the customer experience and visibility, in practice, remains partial, brittle, and often opaque to end users.
“It’s OK if they have the data,” he explained, “but if they don’t have the data, you can’t see it.”
For its own part, Moddule works with multiple partners to ingest data on containers, aircraft, warehouse movements, and delivery milestones, normalizes that information, and presents it through a unified interface that can be white-labeled and deployed by logistics providers themselves.
“We just do the shiny bit on top,” Marshall said. “Changing the core systems that these logistics companies operate on is very difficult, we don’t touch that, just how they’re perceived and used by customers.”
Built on Moddule’s data unification layer, the Cory+ platform tracks shipments end to end, from purchase order placement through international transport, customs clearance, warehousing and final delivery. It delivers a single, continuously updated view of a process that typically spans dozens of organizations and handoffs.
When Legacy Meets Urgency
While APIs and webhooks are becoming more common, much of shipping still runs on manual processes. This complexity reinforces a deeply ingrained mindset: that each organization’s system should be the authoritative record.
“A lot of planning is still done manually on spreadsheets,” Marshall said. “At any one point you could be looking at trying to collaborate with 15 different parties, maybe more than 20 different parties, using different systems that all use different referencing data.”
“Everyone has still got a mentality that their system should be the source of truth,” he added. “But their source of truth only covers a percentage of that journey.”
At the same time, data sharing, AI and system integration can often be perceived as threats rather than enablers, particularly by vendors with aging platforms. The industry’s skepticism is also reinforced by past disappointments around innovations.
“There was a big buzz maybe 10 years ago about blockchain. How blockchain was going to revolutionize logistics. And it never did,” Marshall explained.
AI now faces a similar trust gap. Most deployments today focus on narrow, low-risk tasks rather than deeper analytical or predictive applications.
“AI can do things, but there’s still this hesitancy to actually invest in it and actually deploy it,” Marshall said.
Yet Marshall believes the stalemate will not last forever. “It only takes one or two to change that,” he added, noting that digitally forward logistics firms are growing faster than their more traditional competitors.
Source: https://www.pymnts.com/