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IBM Sterling vs Descartes MacroPoint

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Our analysts compared IBM Sterling vs Descartes MacroPoint based on data from our 400+ point analysis of Supply Chain Management Software, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.

Overview Pricing Benefits & Features User Ratings Analyst Summary Screenshots
IBM Sterling Software Tool
Descartes MacroPoint Software Tool
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Product Basics

IBM Sterling is an open, integrated platform that leverages advanced technologies like AI and blockchain to connect with the supplier ecosystem. It provides real-time insights, end-to-end visibility and recommended measures to transform interruptions into customer engagement, profit and growth opportunities.

It offers support for supplier, inventory and order management. Users can build smarter business networks using business process improvement, supply chain visibility, supplier collaboration, manufacturing solutions, order fulfillment and retail solutions. It also supports B2B collaboration to fulfill ongoing business demands, minimize complexity and reduce costs.
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Descartes MacroPoint is a sophisticated software solution designed to enhance supply chain management by providing real-time visibility and tracking of shipments. It is particularly well-suited for logistics companies, freight brokers, and shippers who need to monitor the status and location of their goods throughout the transportation process. This software helps streamline operations, reduce inefficiencies, and improve customer satisfaction by offering accurate and timely updates.

Key benefits of Descartes MacroPoint include improved operational efficiency, enhanced communication with carriers, and the ability to proactively manage potential disruptions. Popular features include real-time tracking, automated alerts, and comprehensive reporting tools that provide actionable insights into supply chain performance.

Compared to similar products, users often highlight Descartes MacroPoint's ease of integration and user-friendly interface. Pricing typically varies based on the scale of operations and specific needs, with options for monthly or annual payments. This flexibility allows businesses to choose a plan that aligns with their budget and operational requirements.

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$80 Monthly
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$1,000/User, Annually
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Product Assistance

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Knowledge Base
24/7 Live Support
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Product Insights

  • Evolve Business Processes: Maintain business continuity, reduce operational silos, respond to market disruptions and mitigate risks with intelligent workflows. Improve interactions between people, data and processes through its experts and reduce inventory costs with process improvements. 
  • Improve Visibility: Supply chain stakeholders can access data related to inventory, order processes, delivery and potential disruptions. Improves customer service, assists with regulatory directives and mitigates interruptions affecting supplier inventory levels and product delivery with advanced insights. 
  • Supplier Collaboration: Streamline collaboration to drive efficiencies, increase supplier satisfaction, resolve disruptions for procure-to-pay transactions and order-to-cash with supplier collaboration solutions and global business networks. Quickly respond to supplier issues with embedded AI capabilities like cycle time prediction, anomaly detection and next-best-action recommendations. 
  • Deliver Customer Promises: Track orders from inception to delivery, manage data and processes and gain visibility into all orders throughout channels. Offers various solutions that include order management, order fulfillment, inventory management and digital store operations. 
  • Enhance Manufacturing Management: Innovate supply chain management by transforming outdated processes, uncovering hidden insights and delivering superior customer experience with automation, IoT, AI and blockchain. It helps avoid disruptions, improve visibility, respond quickly and streamline planning and optimization. 
  • Retail Technology Services: Evolve the shopping experience with advanced retail solutions for fulfilling digital demands. Revitalize customer engagement by delivering omnichannel marketing messages and offers tailored to the customer base. Minimize disruptions to the supply chain through various retail technology solutions. 
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  • Enhanced Visibility: Gain real-time insights into the location and status of shipments, reducing uncertainty and improving decision-making.
  • Improved Customer Satisfaction: Provide accurate delivery estimates and proactive notifications, leading to higher customer trust and loyalty.
  • Operational Efficiency: Automate manual tracking processes, freeing up resources and reducing the likelihood of human error.
  • Cost Reduction: Identify inefficiencies and optimize routes to lower transportation costs and improve profit margins.
  • Risk Mitigation: Monitor potential disruptions and respond swiftly to issues such as delays or route changes, minimizing impact on the supply chain.
  • Data-Driven Decisions: Leverage comprehensive analytics to make informed strategic decisions, enhancing overall supply chain performance.
  • Regulatory Compliance: Ensure adherence to industry regulations and standards, reducing the risk of fines and legal complications.
  • Scalability: Easily scale operations to meet growing business demands without compromising on efficiency or accuracy.
  • Enhanced Collaboration: Foster better communication and coordination among stakeholders, including carriers, shippers, and customers.
  • Environmental Impact: Optimize routes and reduce fuel consumption, contributing to sustainability goals and reducing carbon footprint.
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  • Business Network: Offers cloud-based and security-rich connectivity with suppliers, partners and customers. Ensure timely order deliveries with real-time intelligence and recommendations through AI capabilities. Provides multi-party visibility of digital events throughout the supply chain via blockchain, empowering transparency and trust. 
  • Food Trust: Connects participants through an immutable, permissioned and shared record of processing details, food provenance, transaction data and more through its collaborative network. Trace the location and status of food products, including essential details like multi-ingredient and farm-store view. 
  • Visibility Insights: Optimize performance by correlating data from disparate and siloed systems, creating digital playbooks and capturing organizational knowledge. Accelerate time to value, get intelligent insights, manage inventory and mitigate disruptions to meet demand through the inventory control tower. Supply chain intelligence services help boost data integration by developing purpose-built control towers using a control tower solution blueprint. 
  • TradeLens Platform: Gain access to a supply chain and logistics network with over half of the global container shipping volume data coverage through an interconnected supply chain partners system. Every shipment party can access their information and all transactions’ audit trails using its permission matrix. Offers services and apps developed by TradeLens and third parties to accelerate innovation and value creation. 
  • Trust Your Supplier: Identify, onboard and manage qualified suppliers through a blockchain-based solution. It helps expedite supplier onboarding, lower procurement operating costs, reduce compliance risk, speed new supplier assessments, access verified data and streamline insight sharing. 
  • Business Transaction Intelligence: Provides insights into B2B transaction lifecycles. Offers multi-part shared transaction visibility and empowers users with real-time visibility and self-service. Prevents potential risks by giving discrepancy alerts on B2B transaction anomalies. 
  • Transaction Manager: Automates manual B2B transactions and helps save money and time by cutting costs, reducing errors and elevating user satisfaction with customers, non-EDI suppliers and other trading partners. Gain unified visibility throughout supply chain partner transactions and onboard non-technical trading partners. 
  • Document Conversion Services: Converts manual transactions and non-structured documents like email, pdf and fax into EDI or other structured formats. Provides various features, including advanced OCR to read images, customized exception handling, multiple language support and ICR technology to recognize handwriting. 
  • Order Management: Ensures omnichannel order fulfillment by combining inventory and delivery visibility, multichannel order aggregation and service availability in a single platform. It helps customize monitoring and alerts, take immediate actions on capacity, deliver order promises with intelligent fulfillment and use reverse logistics to track inventory. 
  • Fulfillment Optimizer with Watson: Enhance existing order management systems and minimize cost-to-serve with cognitive analytics engine. Retailers can utilize store capacity, balance protecting margins and meet delivery expectations, increasing profits. 
  • Inventory Visibility: Explore product highlights and find use-case specific solutions. Users can personalize dashboards, balance inventory across channels, track inventory velocity, enable drop shipping, leverage autoscaling, get real-time views with the Cassandra database, Akamai gateways and more. 
  • Store Engagement: Gain inventory, customer and order data view through an intuitive user-interface, accessible from mobile devices and sales counters. Provides cross-sell and up-sell recommendations, enables flexible fulfillment options, helps standardize processes for task and inventory management and manages returns throughout channels using purpose-built tools. 
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  • Real-Time Visibility: Provides up-to-the-minute tracking of shipments, allowing users to monitor the exact location and status of their freight.
  • Automated Status Updates: Automatically sends notifications about shipment milestones, such as departure, arrival, and delays, to keep all stakeholders informed.
  • Geofencing Capabilities: Utilizes geofencing technology to trigger alerts when a shipment enters or exits predefined geographic boundaries.
  • Carrier Integration: Seamlessly integrates with a wide range of carriers, ensuring comprehensive coverage and consistent data flow across different transportation providers.
  • Predictive Analytics: Employs advanced algorithms to forecast potential disruptions and delays, enabling proactive decision-making and risk mitigation.
  • Customizable Dashboards: Offers user-friendly dashboards that can be tailored to display key performance indicators and metrics relevant to specific business needs.
  • Mobile Access: Provides a mobile application that allows users to access shipment information and receive alerts on-the-go, ensuring constant connectivity.
  • Document Management: Facilitates the storage and sharing of important shipping documents, such as bills of lading and proof of delivery, within the platform.
  • Temperature Monitoring: Monitors and reports on the temperature conditions of sensitive shipments, ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements and quality standards.
  • Exception Management: Identifies and flags exceptions in the supply chain, such as delays or route deviations, allowing for quick resolution and minimal disruption.
  • Data Security: Implements robust security measures to protect sensitive shipment data from unauthorized access and cyber threats.
  • API Integration: Supports API integration with other enterprise systems, such as ERP and TMS, for seamless data exchange and enhanced operational efficiency.
  • Historical Data Analysis: Provides tools for analyzing historical shipment data to identify trends, optimize routes, and improve overall supply chain performance.
  • Compliance Management: Ensures adherence to industry regulations and standards, helping businesses avoid penalties and maintain good standing.
  • Customer Portal: Offers a dedicated portal for customers to track their shipments, enhancing transparency and customer satisfaction.
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Product Ranking

#19

among all
Supply Chain Management Software

#198

among all
Supply Chain Management Software

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User Sentiment Summary

Great User Sentiment 47 reviews
Excellent User Sentiment 4 reviews
84%
of users recommend this product

IBM Sterling has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 84% when considering 47 user reviews from 5 recognized software review sites.

90%
of users recommend this product

Descartes MacroPoint has a 'excellent' User Satisfaction Rating of 90% when considering 4 user reviews from 2 recognized software review sites.

4.1 (38)
n/a
5.0 (1)
4.5 (2)
4.6 (5)
4.5 (2)
4.5 (2)
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4.0 (1)
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Awards

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Descartes MacroPoint stands above the rest by achieving an ‘Excellent’ rating as a User Favorite.

User Favorite Award

Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Integration: It supports integration with multiple external systems, as noted by 88% of reviewers who mention integration.
Customization: It offers highly customizable tools and features, as observed by 50% of the users who refer to reports.
Ease of Use: It offers a flexible platform that is easy to use, manage and modify, as noted by all the reviewers specifying ease of use.
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Real-Time Visibility: Many users appreciate MacroPoint's real-time tracking feature, which allows them to see the location of their shipments on a map in real time. This helps them stay informed about the status of their shipments and identify potential delays.
Improved Communication: Users highlight that MacroPoint facilitates better communication between shippers, carriers, and customers. The platform provides a centralized location for sharing tracking information and updates, reducing the need for phone calls and emails.
Reduced Detention Time: Some users report that MacroPoint has helped them reduce detention time at loading docks. By providing real-time visibility into shipment locations, MacroPoint enables shippers and carriers to coordinate arrival times more effectively, minimizing wait times.
Exception Management: Users value MacroPoint's ability to proactively identify potential issues with shipments. The platform can send alerts for events like delays or temperature deviations, allowing users to take corrective action promptly.
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Learning Curve: It is complicated to understand and involves a steep learning curve, as stated by 57% of the users who report learning curve.
Interface: Over 50% of reviewers that mentioned the interface stated that the interface is not user-friendly and intuitive.
Resource-Intensive: It consumes a large amount of system resources, as observed by all reviewers referring to system resource utilization.
Implementation: Around 67% of the users who specified implementation report that the deployment and implementation process is cumbersome.
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Limited Carrier Adoption: Many users express frustration over carriers not actively using or updating their location in the system, leading to inaccurate or incomplete tracking data.
Communication Barriers: Some users find the communication features within the platform to be cumbersome, making it difficult to connect with drivers and resolve issues efficiently.
Technical Glitches: Occasional system errors, software bugs, and integration challenges have been reported, causing disruptions to tracking and communication workflows.
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IBM Sterling is a flexible and easy-to-use supply chain suite that helps its customers build dynamic and smarter business networks. It has a highly customizable platform and supports comprehensive integration capabilities with various external systems. Many reviewers have noted that it does not have an intuitive user interface, and the implementation process can be cumbersome. It involves a steep learning curve, and users find it complicated to understand. It also consumes a large amount of system resources, making it slow sometimes.

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Is Descartes MacroPoint a macro solution for your micro logistics problems? User reviews from the last year suggest that Descartes MacroPoint is a robust supply chain management software with a few caveats. Users praise its real-time visibility and tracking capabilities, highlighting the accuracy of its estimated time of arrival alerts and geofencing features as major strengths. For instance, one user mentioned that the software's ability to track shipments across multiple modes of transportation, from trucks to ships, has been instrumental in optimizing their international logistics. However, some users have expressed concerns about the platform's user interface, finding it less intuitive compared to competitors like FourKites and project44. This difficulty has, at times, led to a steeper learning curve for new users. Despite this drawback, Descartes MacroPoint differentiates itself through its extensive carrier network and seamless integration with various transportation management systems. This interconnectivity makes it easier for businesses to onboard their existing carriers and streamline data sharing, as noted by several users who praised the platform's ability to consolidate information from different sources into a single dashboard. This feature is particularly valuable for businesses working with a large network of carriers, as it reduces manual data entry and minimizes the risk of errors. In conclusion, Descartes MacroPoint is best suited for businesses, particularly those in freight brokerage, third-party logistics, and shipping, that prioritize real-time visibility and need to manage a complex network of carriers. Its strengths lie in its robust tracking features, extensive carrier network, and integration capabilities. However, businesses looking for a more user-friendly interface might need to consider the platform's learning curve or explore alternative solutions.

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