Global supply chains are no longer just complex — they are increasingly fragile.
Over the past few years, disruption has shifted from being the exception to the norm. In 2025, a report by UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD) claimed global shipping was entering a period of “fragility and volatility” with the Red Sea crisis forcing vessels to reroute around Africa adding weeks to voyages, drought conditions in the Panama Canal constraining vessel capacity, and, more recently, heightened geopolitical tensions in the Middle East continuing to create uncertainty in the market.
“Disruption is no longer an occasional event in our industry. It is now the operating environment,” WiseTech Global’s CEO, Zubin Appoo, recently told the IFCBAA.
For logistics providers, this highlights a fundamental operating challenge: visibility over port-based milestones is no longer enough. Knowing when cargo enters high-risk transit zones is now critical to building resilient operations.
Why chokepoints have become the fault lines of global trade
Only a small number of waterways carry an outsized share of global trade. Approximately 12% of global trade passes through the Suez Canal, and the Panama Canal supports around 6% of international maritime traffic. In energy markets, the Strait of Hormuz serves as the primary transit route for roughly 20–25% of the world’s seaborne oil trade, with a further 10–12% passing through the Bab al-Mandab Strait.
These are not just shipping routes. They are critical chokepoints, where disruption can ripple across global supply chains in a matter of days.
Ongoing instability in the Middle East has underscored how quickly disruption risk at the Strait of Hormuz can lead to capacity constraints, increased shipping costs, blown out transit times and spiking insurance rates, all of which significantly impact global trade flows.
The problem with visibility today
Most supply chain visibility is structured around key milestones, such as when a shipment departs, arrives, or is delivered.
These milestones provide important checkpoints and form the foundation of operational tracking. However, they tend to concentrate around ports and handover points, offering far less visibility into what happens in between.
Delays can occur at any stage of a shipment, at origin, at port, or in transit, but the most difficult to anticipate and manage are those that emerge mid-voyage, particularly as cargo moves through constrained or high-risk transit zones.
Without clear visibility into these moments, logistics teams often find themselves:
- Reacting after disruptions have already impacted schedules
- Communicating with customers based on incomplete or delayed information
- Managing exceptions late, when fewer options remain to respond effectively
Closing the mid-voyage visibility gap
One of the biggest blind spots in logistics has always been the middle of the journey. By introducing event signals tied to real-world vessel movement, that gap begins to close.
With Cargowise, customers can now extend visibility into these critical, disruption-prone shipping zones.
“This new capability is about detecting real-world vessel movement at critical transit points and linking that directly to customer shipments, so teams can see exactly when their cargo enters higher-risk zones,” explains Pierre Hausken, Product Leader at WiseTech Global.
“Visibility alone, however, is only the first step. The real value comes when these signals become decision triggers.”
When logistics providers can detect that a shipment has entered a high-risk zone, they are able to proactively prepare contingency plans for emerging disruptions and adjust downstream operations.
CargoWise enables teams to turn these real-time signals into action, automatically triggering workflows such as customer notifications, milestone updates, or internal alerts, ensuring that the moment a shipment enters a strategic waterway, the right response is already in motion. This is a key shift in operations, from reactive firefighting to proactive exception management.
More broadly, this reflects an industry-wide trend, moving from just efficiency to resilience, with logistics providers increasingly focused on building supply chains that can absorb shocks, adapt quickly, and sustain service levels under uncertainty.