Digital tools for Mexico’s supply chain
Visible signs of improvement in Mexico
Mexico’s automotive players are embracing digital technology in logistics to improve visibility of parts and vehicle movements, mitigating delays and improving real-time updates to domestic and overseas shipments.
Carmakers, parts suppliers and their logistics providers in Mexico are making progress on the adoption of digital tools to optimise inbound logistics flows through improved supply chain transparency and real-time data exchange, according to speakers at this year’s Automotive Logistics & Supply Chain Mexico conference.
Maxim Serov, regional supply chain director at tier supplier Benteler and for its autonomous vehicle division Holon, said that the company was reaching for end-to-end visibility not just within the company but across its suppliers, carriers, custom brokers and end customers.
Benteler has three priorities in achieving this visibility. The first is reliable master data in enterprise resource planning systems (ERPs) as well as transit and lead times, and inventory. Without that reliable data any company risks being left with a dashboard showing the wrong information. Good data also needs to be reliably connected with suppliers beyond the tier one level and with logistics providers so all the information is available for predictive decision making, said Serov. Even the smallest carriers need to be able to send real-time updates.
“Once you have all this, you can basically foresee when the next shortage will come up and whether you have a line shutdown situation in front of you, and then obviously to react ahead of the time,” said Serov.
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Hellmann Worldwide Logistics is also collaborating with parts suppliers and logistics providers through its control tower in the Americas (it also has control towers in Asia Pacific and the Europe). Jeff Gilbertson, ISC solutions director for the Americas, said the trick was marrying the data it gathered through the control tower with what its OEM customers were looking for into one version of ‘the truth’. He said collaboration was the most critical element in achieving that.
“We have a client that moved approximately 40,000 TEUs through our platform with multiple carriers, specifically on the ocean freight trade, including imports and exports,” Gilbertson explained. He said that by collaborating with parts suppliers and logistics providers Hellmann is able to draw up a workflow process that looks for exceptions – where there might be gaps – and makes that available to the customer automatically. For Hellmann that real-time visibility is the cherry on top of the cake.
All eyes on the stream
Logistics provider CH Robinson, which has been providing services to the automotive sector in Mexico for 35 years, now provides 186,000 sq. m of cross-border storage and warehousing services, and moves millions of shipments cross border and within Mexico every year.
Chris Cutshaw, vice-president of business development and market solutions, said the company is now focused on digital transformation and his task is to bring new technology to bear for customers.
CH Robinson is now doing a lot of predictive modelling and has one of the largest data sets in the industry following the digital transformation it has made over the last five years. In terms of architecture, the company has established data centres that process the large amounts of data supported by Microsoft’s Azure data platform. “We've moved a lot to streaming architecture, which means the data is always writing to a stream to which other ingestion or reading mechanisms are listening,” said Cutshaw.
He said that avoids having to write to five different systems because the information goes to a common stream from which different parties can pull. Cutshaw also revealed that CH Robinson has moved a lot of internal processes to intermediary application programming interface (API), rather than EDI, which can handle tens of millions of transactions an hour.
“That allows us to run scenarios, modelling and prediction outcomes a lot faster,” said Cutshaw, adding that it centralised and harmonised data, and it built an infrastructure that allowed access to the data very quickly and enabled customers to also tap into it.
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Visible for speed
Meanwhile, Ascent Global Logistics (AGL), which deals in time-critical and expedited freight, is also making its processes more transparent through information sharing. That is enabling companies to mitigate any supply chain problems with better prediction and reaction times.
Daryl Knight, chief commercial officer at Ascent, highlighted its Peak platform for shipping management, which is designed to streamline logistics operations and provide instant access to a network of premier industry carriers. Knight said the real-time information source is able to give a quality score, including how likely it is that pickup and delivery will happen in the time required.
“[The platform] looks at the providers [for] damage ratio, their service performance, and other various factors that then turn into a percentage score which gets weighted and produced in addition to the cost for the actual services,” said Knight.
Ascent is using its Peak platform for international airfreight and third-party logistics providers (3PLs) can provide details of their services and costs, as well as transit times on the platform. The real-time sharing of information on shipments makes for high-quality responses at a competitive cost, according to Knight, who added that it gives end customers full control and autonomy to decide what option they want in between 30-90 minutes. “We are expanding that into Mexico and we will be launching it in Europe at the beginning of the year,” said Knight.
Patrick Nily, vice-president for automotive at Airspace, which also provides time-critical shipments, said that that providing reliable milestones in transit timing was the biggest challenge. Airspace started its Partner Portal project in 2025, which aims to ensure the end customer can trace inbound parts immediately from the pickup along every milestone of the inbound delivery process. Airspace has a big network of partners and the aim is to get as close to a real-time and exact tracking of the shipment as possible. Partner Portal is about being able to integrate every partner in the network, according to Nily.
Time-critical shipments, such as the ones Ascent and Airspace deal with, necessarily depend on real-time information, but Knight said that scrutiny of the how that information is derived is an important consideration. With the right checks Ascent is now looking at how it can automate the supply of information it is still getting in a manual way.
It is also important to define real-time according to mode, said Cutshaw. Updates every 15 minutes may not be necessary on ocean shipments but knowing in real time that status of a truck is at a border crossing could be crucial.
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“We have over 400,000 carriers that we integrate with, so we take this very seriously,” said Cutshaw. “I think as a provider, in certain scenarios, if you're very clear on your expectations and you have the ability to measure consistently, [you can see if] those providers are meeting the expectations.”
Escaping the silo
Reliable connections depend on secure and trustworthy connections with partners. Without that, companies working exclusively on internal improvements are simply digitalising their own , according to Nily. The benefits of full visibility need to be shared. Nily said everybody benefits from full visibility over the whole supply chain but he admitted it is a big challenge in automotive, where companies rely on their own transport management systems, with which others are expected to connect.
Gabriela Karthe Figueroa, production order control manager at VW de México, said that the carmaker has an open relationship with its suppliers motivated by bringing greater clarity to the complicated supply chain landscape today . “We have a really good relation with [our suppliers] and we try to look at the middle point where there are benefits for both. We receive a really good collaboration from them with benefits in costs and time.”
AI step change
AI-enabled technology is increasingly being used in automotive supply chains to gain more transparency on the magnitude of supply chain data and parts deliveries.
Cutshaw said CH Robinson has been using agentic AI – systems that can autonomously plan and execute tasks – for its control tower network. It is also testing OpenAI models, a step change for its business model.
According to Cutshaw, CH Robinson runs all of the email, text and voice queries it gets from multimodal 3PLs and runs them through a large language model (LLM), which classifies what is being requested and provides context. The underlying LLM agents perform specific tasks, such as reading a Carta Porte document (Mexico’s mandatory digital tax document), translating it into a data object to send to a designated location.
“We did a time study for Mexico cross-border with a few customers just to see how much communication happens on a single truckload that's crossing the border, and its usually three transportation parties involved,” explained Cutshaw. “We are seeing upwards of 40 to 50 emails on one truckload and that's not to talk about the [additional] WhatsApp messages.”
Gilbertson said that Hellmann is in the beta stages of using machine learning and AI to scrub world data for port congestions, drawing information from companies working specifically on areas such as terminals or weather disruption.
“We take that into our platform and then we actually are able to then tell the customer where the risks are down to the specific shipment,” he said. “It is a way for us to manage risk.”
Maxim Serov said there is definitely room for improvement in digital infrastructure investment in Mexico but that is not because partners there don't want to digitalise, it is more to do with investment and knowledge barriers which the automotive sector needs to overcome. In terms of knowledge, Serov said that education in digitalisation and AI is needed, starting at the universities, because they are so complex and developing fast.
Serov also mentioned the structural restrictions in Mexico, with often patchy Wifi and internet access subject to regions across the country. He said this needs to be improved specifically in the areas of production.
Securing the data
Assessing where to focus in-house capabilities and where to outsource technology is about weighing proprietary and security considerations, according to Cutshaw. “OEMs and suppliers should own the data infrastructure that they're building because of where we're going with the advancement in technology,” he said, though he admitted it is tough to get there on your own.
Mexico has been a market where there has generally seen more insourcing, though that could be changing. At the same time, automotive is an industry being asked to do more with less and that persuades companies to look at what is available out in the market rather than invest in-house, according to Cutshaw. Nevertheless, he stressed the importance of companies retaining close ownerships of their central data infrastructure. “Then you can have vendors that are integrating and helping you achieve a really robust data model of your network that you can deploy.”
Culturing the digital switch
The ability to make the best use of secure data is as dependent on the people using it as much as the capability and quality of the software chosen. Companies are training staff in the technology required to automate time-consuming manual reports to support the drive toward logistics digitalisation. It is also a case of recruiting the right talent. At CH Robinson it is about looking for data architects rather than manual operators. Foundational coding is now automated so there is little need to recruit there.
“I'm now of the mindset that we need a really good architecture that's centrally developed but at the edge, allowing flexibility and tailored solutions with the AI at the hands of the operator,” said Cutshaw.
People generally want to do well at fulfilling the tasks and the problems that are coming their way and being good at setting objectives for them means helping them change in some way, adopting new practices and technologies to meet those objectives. It is a cultural switch in the company’s outlook.
“It drives change for them to be able to achieve the outcomes and objectives that we're all looking for to stay relevant,” he said.
This helps with job retention as employees are looking for fulfilling work not endless documents to read and input manually. Plus, the ability to respond immediately to a situation with an action is made a lot more efficient and is something that is definitely applicable in Mexico and something CH Robinson is applying more widely.
That cultural shift has to be led by managerial understanding of the objectives for the company.
You always have to work backwards from what is the return that you're looking to get… because that's going to be the business case that you're going to need to sell to do something,” said Cutshaw.
At CH Robinson it is about understanding IT infrastructure, mapping out what is physical and then overlaying where digital nodes and integrations could be most effective. Cutshaw said it is very important to establish clear guidelines and KPIs for the team to realise the digital transformation. He pointed to CH Robinson’s use of Apache Kafka data streaming software (from AWS) the company’s move to use API microservice infrastructure to process more data instead of trying to send massive payloads.
“For your partners, make it super clear on what you expect from them and then rigorously scorecard your ability as you go down that process,” said Cutshaw. “Also, be happy with failing and try something new quickly and always try to land on where your original ROI was.”
Rethinking vehicle distribution with control tower technology at VW de México
In a keynote presentation, Gabriela Karthe Figueroa, production order control manager, VW de México, outlined a control tower project the carmaker is running specific to finished vehicle deliveries.
She said it is important for VW de México to know exactly where its vehicles are at any one time and the carmaker has set up a control tower that acts as a centralised supply chain hub integrating data, processes and communication for the outbound logistics with real-time shipment tracking that feeds into company’s proactive production risk management tool. The control tower, which works 24 hours on a three-shift pattern staffed by 38 people, provides transparency on vehicle shipments and can quickly identify any delay or congestion risks. The control tower provides consolidated, accurate and timely data to optimise routes and reduce costs, according to Karthe.
Karthe provided the example of monitoring rail shipments between its Puebla assembly plant to the east coast port of Veracruz. “If we have any trouble with the rail transport, we are able to react immediately and reroute shipments from the plant to truck and move them to the port so that they are there 24 hours before the ETA of the vessel.”
Coping with congestion
Karthe pointed to the problems with congestion for automotive shipments to the ports and northern border that carmakers are living with in Mexico. The control tower project got started with two of the more complicated processes in vehicle distribution for VW de México, located at Veracruz and Cuidad Juárez, respectively a port location and a border crossing. “The congestion and the transit times have given us a lot of trouble regarding delivery time to our customers and in terms of cost for the moorage,” explained Karthe.
She also highlighted the external geopolitical conflicts that were affecting shipments and other factors, including weather events that are getting worse. While it is not able to predict the weather, VW de México is able to predict its own operations and just-in-time delivery operations.
Meeting customer expectations is important to VW and those customers are looking for more traceability and punctuality, which relies on reinforcing trust with its logistics partners, according to Karthe. That has a financial impact, with delays leading to avoidable vehicle storage costs at the ports or at cross-border locations, which adds to pressure on automotive margins.
VW de México’s finished vehicle control tower project aims to tackle these issues by providing real-time shipment visibility and improving coordination among carriers, said Karthe. The benefits of centralised control and communication include more efficient and reliable vehicle deliveries both within Mexico and to export markets.
What is really important for VW is clear definitions on logistics provider KPIs, including what tasks they are responsible for carrying out and the time required to do so. That is managed by a team with multidisciplinary skills and a clear understanding of what they have to achieve.
“The yard manager is going to know that they are responsible for the vehicles being in the correct yard and our IT team is responsible for guaranteeing that all the vehicles that physically are in the yards are already in the correct system, and with the correct tracking,” said Karthe.
Control for collaboration
Karthe was keen to highlight that the control tower is not an isolated operation but depends on collaboration with the wider VW Group Logistics globally.
“Volkswagen Group Logistics are responsible for all the other parts of the process – they receive and send us the vehicles and we work with them using a robust process for information such as vessel arrivals, who is going to track the vehicles and who is going to develop all the documentation,” explained Karthe.
The control tower is also in daily contact with VW de México’s Production Control unit and is able to follow up on each vehicle from its production order to check that vehicles allocated to destination are ready for shipment. That transparency helps VW de México quickly prioritise shipments to markets depending on external circumstances.
Communication and collaboration is also maintained with VW’s partners across the distribution network. That includes port and terminal operators, ocean vessel operators, rail and road transport providers, and customs brokers at the land borders and ports.
With regard to rail, VW de México gets information on the location of the wagons, whether they are loaded or empty, and when they will be returning to the plant. “All of us know that sometimes when the equipment crosses the border you don’t where it is, so now, with this specific report and working with the rail providers, we are reaching a really good collaboration.”
VW has negotiated a specific kind of report with the rail companies for scheduling and how many trains the carmaker can expect to manage exports and imports. “We receive the platform availability, transit times and any disruptions that we have on the different routes,” said Karthe.
Information on trucks for road transport is an important topic. VW de México has 361 dealers to which trucking companies transport imported vehicles from the port of Veracruz as well as from the Puebla plant. VW de México receives GPS alerts and truck availability notices, and it has a specific app to follow up the vehicles until the dealer.
“It’s a big deal to put the transport companies together with dealers but this is thanks to collaboration… if we didn't have the collaboration of each part of the total chain it would not be possible,” said Karthe.
Customs broker documentation is also very important. Karthe pointed to the mandatory Carta Porte digital waybill as a good example of where better communication is improving potentially disruptive customs processes.
“The EDI communication in Carta Porte was a big challenge for all of us but with our control tower, we established together with customs broker, the tracking of each document,” said Karthe, adding that VW can ensure the right document is ready for the arrival of the vehicles at the ports, ready to start our operations without disruption.
