Europe's supply chain visibility gap starts at the warehouse door

Supply chain visibility is the ability to know where goods are, what condition they are in, and what is likely to happen next, from supplier to customer. European companies have invested heavily in that capability upstream, while the delivery leg has received far less attention.

In their 2024 Global Supply Chain Leader Survey, McKinsey illustrates this imbalance: 60% of supply chain leaders reported comprehensive visibility of tier-one suppliers, while visibility into deeper tiers fell for the second year running, with only 7% reporting end-to-end real-time visibility across their networks.

For retailers and 3PLs, one of the least coherent parts of that end-to-end picture begins after the order ships. The parcel moves into a carrier network and starts reporting its progress in that carrier's status codes, systems, and terminology. In a multi-carrier operation, that can mean several different versions of the same delivery journey.

Europe makes the problem harder, with a fragmented parcel market of national posts, regional specialists, freight carriers, same-day services, and fast-growing out-of-home networks all operating side by side. Meanwhile, the European Commission is steadily increasing shipment-level data requirements across customs, safety, packaging, and sustainability regulation.

Meanwhile, tracking data is now being used well beyond post-purchase service. The shipment record increasingly has to support customer communication, operations, carrier management, compliance, and reporting.

What supply chain visibility means, and where the industry's definition gets thin

Supply chain visibility is usually discussed across three broad stretches:

1. The inbound stretch covers suppliers, sub-suppliers, and the freight bringing materials or finished goods into the business.

2. Inventory visibility covers stock in warehouses, stores, and transfers between them.

3. The outbound stretch starts once an order has been picked and packed, then follows the carrier booking, label, line-haul, depot scans, last mile, handover, and any return.

Most definitions of supply chain visibility are strongest on the first two. Transportation appears, but often as one item alongside procurement, planning, and production, which reflects the history of the category: much of the technology was designed around manufacturers, containers, purchase orders, and distribution centers.

For a retailer sending parcels through several carriers and markets, the operational reality is different. The delivery leg is where the customer experiences the supply chain directly, and where carrier performance, support demand, and transport cost become visible.

For delivery operations, a useful working definition is: a continuous, machine-readable shipment record from booking through delivery or return, using a common status language regardless of carrier. The record should be available to the customer, the operations team, and the systems that need to act on it.

Real-time visibility adds another requirement: shipment events need to reach those people and systems close enough to the underlying scan that they can still do something useful with the information.

Visibility, traceability, and transparency do different jobs

The terms are often used interchangeably, but they describe different capabilities:

• Visibility tells the people running the operation where a shipment is and what state it is in now.

• Traceability preserves the history so the journey can be reconstructed later, scan by scan. That is what a customs authority, insurer, finance team, or returns operation may need months after delivery.

• Transparency is the decision to expose part of that record externally. A customer sees it on a tracking page. An auditor sees it in an emissions report. A marketplace may use it to assess a delivery promise.

A branded tracking page can provide good customer transparency, while the operational record behind it remains incomplete, with a gap that surfaces when someone needs the full history of a shipment rather than its latest status.

Europe invested upstream first

The investment pattern since 2020 is understandable: the pandemic exposed supplier risk, the Ever Given blocked the Suez Canal in March 2021, and boards discovered how little they knew about deeper supplier tiers. Spending followed, into control towers, supplier mapping, risk analytics, and better inbound data.

And that work produced gains. Tier-one visibility reached 60% in McKinsey's 2024 survey referenced at the beginning of this blog. Deeper-tier visibility remained much weaker, and the same company's 2025 risk pulse, an annual survey of 100 supply chain leaders, found that most companies across sectors still understood their supply chain risks only as far as tier one.

The parcel side largely remained separate, with supply chain control towers still commonly designed around purchase orders, container milestones, port congestion, and supplier lead times. They are less often connected to label creation, carrier event feeds, or the systems used by customer service.

As a result, outbound delivery data can still be spread across carrier portals, spreadsheets, tracking tools, and local integrations, even in companies with sophisticated upstream visibility.

The European carrier market magnifies that fragmentation: a US retailer may cover much of its domestic volume with two national carriers, while a European retailer shipping across five markets is likely to work with national posts, parcel networks, pallet carriers, local specialists, and increasingly a mix of lockers and pick-up points.

The International Post Corporation's 2025 shopper survey, covering 30,970 respondents in 37 countries, found that 46% of regular European online shoppers now favor out-of-home delivery, up 15 percentage points since 2019. In Finland, nearly half of deliveries already go through lockers.

nShift's carrier network alone includes more than 1,000 carriers across 190-plus countries and more than 70 PUDO networks with over 1.2 million pick-up locations. Each carrier has its own event model, terminology, and update schedule. That is the environment carrier management has to deal with globally, and especially in Europe.

Booking several carriers solves only part of the problem because their different event streams still have to be turned into one operational picture. The consolidation among the large US integrators has done little to simplify that European reality, as the life after single-carrier analysis we called out back in January.

Our own history comes from this part of the market: Consignor, one of the companies that became nShift, was founded in 1997, and by the early 2000s Consignor and Unifaun were helping Nordic shippers connect electronically to multiple carriers. The carrier connectivity problem has changed in scale since then, but not in kind; there are more services, more markets, more data, and much higher expectations around the information that comes back.

The carrier connectivity model, from the Nordic carriers' standardization work to one network serving many products, in our own words:

Carriers built good visibility inside their own networks

European parcel carriers have spent years improving the recipient experience. DPD launched Predict in the UK in 2010, giving recipients a one-hour delivery window on the morning of delivery and live driver tracking on a map. Similar capabilities now exist across the major carrier networks: notifications, delivery windows, rerouting, locker options, proof of delivery, and increasingly detailed in-flight updates.

For shippers, the limitation is that these systems are designed around the carrier's own network.

A retailer using six carriers may receive six sets of status codes and send customers to six different tracking environments unless it has a layer that brings those events together. The data often exists, but it arrives in different structures, at different speeds, and with different meanings.

Ofcom's Post Monitoring Report for 2024-25, published in December 2025, found that 68% of UK consumers had experienced a delivery issue in the previous six months, with lack of information among the most common complaints. Better carrier tracking has clearly improved the market, but fragmented information still becomes a customer problem when the retailer cannot interpret or act on it consistently.

Branded tracking helps on the customer side by bringing carrier events into the retailer's own environment. Operationally, the harder work is upstream of that page: normalizing the events, identifying exceptions, and feeding the same information into the systems used by warehouse, service, and logistics teams.

Regulation is making the shipment record more important

For years, the outbound shipment record was largely shaped by what a carrier needed to move and deliver the goods. European regulation is adding new uses for the same data.

Safety and security data

The EU's Import Control System 2 requires an entry summary declaration containing detailed consignment data before goods arrive in the EU. Postal and express carriers have filed since 2021. Road and rail carriers came into scope on 1 April 2025, and the Commission declared the transition to Release 3 complete at the start of September 2025, with temporary derogations in a small number of member states.

Customs data

From 1 July 2026 the €150 duty exemption for low-value consignments ended and a temporary €3 flat duty per item took its place. Product identifiers on consignments became voluntary on the same date and are mandatory from 1 November 2026. The €3 rate runs until 1 July 2028, when the Customs Data Hub comes online and standard duties return. The EU customs changes in 2026 readiness guide covers the mechanics in more detail.

For visibility, the relevant point is that the Hub needs item-level information such as harmonized system codes, product descriptions, values, and identifiers. Much of it belongs in the shipment record already.

Emissions data

The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive asks large companies to report scope 3 emissions. For transport, ISO 14083, published in 2023 and based on the GLEC Framework, provides the reference methodology. It favors primary transport data where available over modeled averages.

For transport reporting, companies increasingly need a detailed record of which carrier moved a shipment, by which mode, and over what distance. The race to track and cut delivery emissions is therefore also a data-quality problem.

Other requirements point in the same direction: packaging rules under PPWR apply from August 2026 and require packaging data. The withdrawal function that online sellers in the EU have had to offer since June 2026 brings the return journey into the same digital flow as the original delivery.

These initiatives have different legal purposes, but operationally they all depend on accurate shipment-level records, and companies that already maintain that clean record can reuse much of the same data across customs, sustainability, operations, and customer communication. At the opposite end: companies that rely on separate carrier portals have more reconciliation to do.

What supply chain visibility requires in practice

In practice, delivery visibility rests on a few basic pieces of infrastructure.

A reliable identifier

Every logistics unit needs an identifier that survives the journey. It is printed on the label and scanned at handoffs, linking an event to a location and time.

The GS1 SSCC is the closest thing to a universal grammar for this, although carrier practices vary. Good label discipline therefore matters long before anyone builds a dashboard. We recently covered the anatomy of a shipping label separately on this blog.

Traceability depends on preserving that identity and the sequence of events attached to it.

A common status language

Carriers report hundreds of different status codes, often in different languages. Meanings overlap, and the terminology is not stable.

"Out for delivery" at one carrier may be "loaded on vehicle" at another and a numeric event code at a third. nShift Track normalizes those carrier statuses into seven categories: System, In transit, Delivered, Information, Carrier exception, Receiver exception, and Sender exception.

The original carrier wording remains available in reports, while the normalized status provides a common language for tracking and analysis.

This normalization is one of the less glamorous parts of multi-carrier visibility, but it is also one of the most important. Status mappings need maintenance whenever a carrier changes its codes or introduces a service.

Clear ownership of exceptions

Each exception needs a clear owner. nShift's normalized categories distinguish carrier, receiver, and sender exceptions for that reason: a depot delay or damaged parcel belongs with the carrier, a failed home delivery or uncollected locker parcel may require the receiver while missing booking information or an EDI problem sits with the sender.

Once that ownership is clear, an exception can trigger the right notification and become part of carrier-performance reporting. Strip it out and suddenly the business has another warning on a screen and no defined response.

A way for the data to leave the tracking system

Shipment information becomes much more useful once other systems can consume it:

• Finance may need events to support invoice checks.

• A warehouse team may need a failed-delivery event to trigger the next operational step.

• A service agent should see the same shipment state the customer sees without opening a separate carrier portal.

In nShift, shipment events can leave through the Shipment Data API, event webhooks, and scheduled CSV or XML exports. Our Data Fabric provides the underlying layer that brings together delivery data from checkout, ERP, WMS, and carrier feeds and translates carrier events into consistent milestones and status codes.

Carrier connections coming into the platform are just as varied. Some carriers take bookings by EDI and return tracking by API, while others still work on scheduled files. Bottom line: a multi-carrier platform has to support that mixture rather than assume one integration pattern.

Company-operated delivery legs belong in the same record. Our Scan App allows a retailer's own drivers and store staff to generate events, including GPS position, proof of delivery, and pick-up codes for store handover.

Prediction is becoming part of visibility

A status feed explains the last known event, but customers increasingly care about the next one: when the parcel will arrive.

Carriers differ widely in the ETA data they provide. nShift Track shows the carrier's ETA where one is available. We also launched this year AI-powered delivery time predictions using machine learning models trained on historical shipment data for each carrier and route where a carrier ETA is not available. 

ETA prediction depends on consistent historical shipment data, the same dataset used for carrier reporting and compliance.

"Real time" also needs some qualification in a multi-carrier environment:

• A depot scan may reach a carrier's system within seconds, but the shipper receives it according to the carrier's integration method.

• Webhooks and APIs may pass events within minutes.

• Scheduled EDI files can arrive in batches hours apart.

A carrier that exposes only a public tracking page provides information when someone requests it.

Real-time visibility on the delivery leg is therefore partly a property of the carrier connection. A platform can collect events on the rhythm each carrier makes available and normalize their timestamps, but it cannot make a batch file behave like a webhook.

Carrier selection should therefore include how quickly and reliably each carrier returns shipment events, alongside price, service, and geographical coverage.

There is also a new consumer of delivery data: AI shopping assistants increasingly evaluate delivery dates, fees, and returns terms as structured information before recommending where to buy. The agentic inversion looks at that shift in more detail.

Delivery information is starting to influence the sale before a human customer ever opens a tracking page.

What good visibility looks like in operation

ICANIWILL, a Swedish brand shipping 400,000 parcels a year, cut delivery-related customer questions by 50 percent with nShift Track.

Their COO describes the starting point:

"The lack of visibility in our tracking prior to nShift meant we had no idea what our CTR was so even getting this kind of insight is a huge improvement."

Once the delivery record existed in a usable form, the business could measure a channel it had previously struggled to evaluate.

At a very different scale, Unilever Sweden dispatches around 800 pallets a day from its cold warehouse in Helsingborg into delivery windows at ICA and COOP that can be as narrow as half an hour.

"We often have half an hour to deliver our goods. If we miss that time slot, we simply have to turn around and go back to the warehouse again," a process specialist there says.

The operation uses nShift TMS data to monitor performance. "The information from [nShift] makes it possible for us to constantly measure and improve our deliveries."

Despite the very different operating models, both depend on a shipment record accurate enough to support decisions while the goods are moving and analysis after the fact.

How much visibility do you have of your supply chain?

A useful audit of the delivery leg starts with the operating questions rather than a vendor shortlist:

• Can you see every open shipment across every carrier in one place, using one status vocabulary, without logging in to carrier portals?
• When a parcel fails delivery, does your team know before the customer contacts you?
• Can you identify which carrier missed its transit-time SLA most often last month, by lane?
• Can you retrieve the scan history of a parcel delivered six months ago quickly enough for a customs query or insurance claim?
• Do your ERP and warehouse systems receive delivery events automatically, or are people still re-keying information?
• Can you report the mode, distance, and carrier for each shipment in the form your emissions methodology expects?

Few businesses will be equally mature across all of these; the answers show where the work is operational, where it is an integration problem, and where the carrier itself is limiting the data available.

How to improve visibility in the supply chain

A dashboard can only be as consistent as the carrier data feeding it.

• Map the delivery leg first. Establish which carriers, services, and markets are in scope and where shipment events are currently captured.
• Audit event sources carrier by carrier. Record which carriers return data by API, webhook, EDI, scheduled file, or another method. Gaps become much easier to address once they are explicit.
• Normalize statuses before building reports. Map carrier-specific events into a common category set while preserving the original carrier code for detail and audit.
• Assign exception ownership. Decide which events require action from the carrier, receiver, or sender, then route them accordingly.
• Feed shipment events into operational systems. ERP, WMS, customer service, finance, and analytics teams should not have to depend on a separate tracking tool for information they use every day.
• Measure carrier performance against contracted service. Transit-time SLAs by lane, first-attempt delivery, and OTIF are much more useful when based on normalized event data.
• Reuse the shipment record for regulatory data. Customs identifiers, emissions inputs, and packaging information increasingly belong in the same operational record. Multi-carrier shipping software can provide the connective layer where several carriers and systems are involved.

Shipment events should be usable wherever the business needs them, rather than confined to a separate visibility application.

What to look for in supply chain visibility tools

Vendor rankings date quickly, so the comparison is more useful when it starts with the underlying capabilities.

• Start with carrier coverage in the markets where the business actually ships, including relevant parcel, freight, and out-of-home networks.

• Check whether statuses are normalized while preserving the carrier's original event data.

• Look at how exceptions are routed, whether customer tracking and operational reporting use the same dataset, and what happens when the carrier does not provide an ETA.

• The integration model matters just as much as the user interface: shipment events should be available through APIs or webhooks, not trapped inside the application. Companies running their own vans or stores may also need scanning support for those legs.

• Reporting should be exportable without a service request - if emissions reporting is in scope, check the methodology as carefully as the interface. nShift Emissions Tracker's methodology is Smart Freight Centre certified against ISO 14083 and the GLEC Framework.

Why not build directly on the carriers' APIs?

For a small domestic carrier set, many companies do. A small domestic integration estate can be manageable, but as soon as you add markets, the maintenance load grows quickly - especially as each additional market brings its own carriers, status vocabularies, APIs, EDI connections, locker data, service changes, and maintenance cycles. Status mappings need to stay current, different integration patterns have to be supported, and carrier changes to endpoints, authentication methods, or event codes have to be absorbed.

Regulatory requirements add another maintenance stream, with customs, packaging, and emissions data evolving on different timetables.

For larger networks, the question is whether the business wants carrier connectivity and its ongoing maintenance to become a permanent in-house capability. A platform approach moves much of that maintenance into a shared network. nShift Track runs on the same carrier connectivity used across the nShift platform, bringing tracking events into a common data model across carriers.

If the delivery leg is still split across carrier portals and local integrations, that is the part of the visibility architecture worth fixing next.

Visibility has to continue after dispatch

European supply chain teams have spent years improving their understanding of suppliers, inventory, and inbound flows. Outbound delivery has often remained a separate data environment, even though it is the part of the chain customers experience directly.

Carrier performance, customs data, emissions reporting, customer communication, and delivery promises increasingly depend on the same shipment-level record, making a separate outbound data environment harder to justify.

For most businesses, the remaining visibility gap is turning carrier events into a shipment record that works across markets, teams, and systems.

If your shipment record still splits across carrier portals and local integrations, talk to our team about what one record across every carrier and market would take in your operation.