Commentary

By Peter Creeden

Oliver Foerstner / Shutterstock. com

The shift is clear: visibility is moving from reconstructed narratives to sensorverified truth.

For more than a decade, global supply chain visibility arose out of necessity, not design. The industry accepted fragmented, inconsistent and delayed data due to a lack of alternatives. Carriers, terminals, depots and inland operators held isolated information, while early visibility platforms only aggregated available data through application programming interfaces, electronic data interchange, automatic identification systems or scraped tracking pages. This phase focused on dragging an industry reliant on email, phone and fax into a network upgrade. It was a necessary step.

We are now in a very transitional phase. Aggregation filled a gap, but it isn’ t sustainable for an industry facing financial risks, climate accountability and operational complexity. The era of“ good enough” visibility has ended, and data accuracy needs to match its operational and economic impacts.“ Visibility” has reached a point where subscription models using aggregated data no longer meet supply chain accuracy needs. The industry recognizes that the future of visibility depends on structured, devicegenerated data and digital documentation, rather than on inferred events and paper trails.

Device-driven data standards are the catalyst, providing reliable, tamper-resistant physical event data. Electronic bills of lading( eBLs) are emerging as the trusted legal backbone, with shipping lines aiming to make eBLs mandatory by 2030, replacing paper processes and modernizing trade finance. They form the architecture for a digital chain of custody. As regulatory, commercial, and environmental, social and governance pressures push for adoption, the future of visibility lies in inherently digital devices and documents, not retrofitted into legacy systems.

Hapag-Lloyd’ s 2023 decision to upgrade its dry container fleet with internet of things( IoT) devices, completed in 2025, reflects this shift. For a top-five carrier to fully implement real-time monitoring globally is more than a technological upgrade; it’ s a strategic move shaping the industry’ s future. Other major carriers have announced similar upgrades but haven’ t matched this scale or speed. This gap allows alternative IoT solutions, such as e-seals and owner-operated devices, to accelerate the move from inferred to verified events, regardless of each carrier’ s pace. This momentum will bypass the liner carrier community, driven by two tech shifts: GPS-based edge devices and long-range, wide-area sensor networks( LoRaWAN). Modern GPS-enabled smart devices, such as smart container devices, are evolving from trackers into“ edge intelligence hubs” that capture location, movement and security events and serve as gateways for nearby sensors.

LoRaWAN is a low-cost, low-power, longrange wireless protocol that creates gateways at ports, terminals and inland logistics zones. It enables small, low-cost sensors to transmit authenticated data over distances exceeding one kilometer, even in dense metal environments.

This enables automated detection of gate movements, tampering events and container interactions without manual scanning or expensive infrastructure. When combined, GPS-enabled smart devices and LoRaWAN sensors now cover the entire cargo spectrum: high-value shipments justify premium, high-resolution GPS tracking, while low-cost LoRaWAN supports low-value or commodity cargo.

These technologies mark the beginning of a device-native visibility era: smart devices act as

52 Journal of Commerce | February 2, 2026 www. joc. com