An industry survey published by the software provider Cargoclix in July 2026 paints a sobering picture. Only about one in five companies surveyed rates its own level of digitalisation as high or very high, while the majority place themselves somewhere in the middle. What stands out is not the self-assessment but the reasoning behind it. Internal staff shortages are no longer the leading obstacle. That position now belongs to the limited digital maturity of partners, meaning freight forwarders and suppliers. In third place: missing standards and integrations, named by 43.2 percent of respondents.
With 37 companies surveyed, the sample is small, so the result is closer to a mood reading than a statistic. It still hits something we hear in project conversations almost daily. The digitalisation problem does not sit inside the ERP system. It sits at the edges. In the places where your own system landscape ends and your supplier’s, your forwarder’s or your service provider’s begins.
The software industry’s reflex answer
For years the industry has given the same answer to this problem: the suite. One vendor, one system, everything from a single source. The logic is easy to follow. Where only one system is in use, there are no integrations that can break.
The approach does not solve the problem, though. It moves it.
First, no supply chain ends at the company boundary. A fashion company can map every internal process inside a suite and still face the question of how the supplier in Bangladesh, the forwarder in Rotterdam and the customs service provider feed in their data. Second, the vendor itself becomes the bottleneck. Every new requirement waits on their roadmap, whether that is a changed customs rule, a new inspection standard or an additional carrier. Third, breadth in a system rarely comes with depth. A vendor that does everything rarely does any of it as well as a specialist.
A strong core and open edges
We deliberately chose the other route. OSCA is not a system that covers everything. It is a layer between the ERP system and the partners in the supply chain. Collaboration is the core: order, delivery and transport data in one place, visible to everyone involved, inside a shared process. Everything beyond that we bring in through open integrations with specialists.
That is precisely why our partner network has grown over the past twelve months. It is not a sales instrument. It is a map of the integrations our customers actually need, and it falls into three layers.
The ERP layer. Most of our customers work with an established SAP or Microsoft Dynamics landscape that they do not want to replace, and should not have to. The question is not whether the ERP system stays, but how it gets extended with collaborative capabilities without turning into a two-year project. We work with realcore and xalution, two partners whose core business is exactly this kind of integration work. realcore focuses on SAP, xalution brings Microsoft Dynamics expertise along with industry experience in fashion.
The transport and visibility layer. The moment goods are in transit, the data leaves the building. Status updates then come from systems nobody inside the company can access. Shippeo brings real-time transport visibility and carrier booking directly into OSCA, while intelliway synchronises transport data automatically so status updates are available without manual tracking. Neither is a bolt-on module. Both are integrated without media breaks.
The layer of adjacent specialist processes. Customs clearance and quality inspection are disciplines in their own right, with their own depth. Through the connection to ALS, the customs service provider receives all relevant shipment information automatically and in structured form from OSCA, while the clearance status stays visible inside OSCA. Through the integration with Qarma, quality and inspection data sits in the same process as the purchase order.
What this looks like in practice
A typical scenario from our field: a fashion company with around 200 suppliers in Asia runs its purchase orders in the ERP system, communicates delivery dates by email, tracks shipments through the portals of three different forwarders, and records inspection reports in a separate Excel file. No single one of these steps is particularly demanding. Together they create a rework load nobody has budgeted for, because it is spread across so many shoulders.
The way out is rarely a new all-in-one system. It lies in closing the handovers, one at a time, in the order in which they cause damage.
Conclusion
The Cargoclix figures confirm what is already visible in our work with customers. Connectivity is not a product feature you purchase. It is an architectural decision, and one you do not make alone. A vendor claiming to cover every integration in a supply chain on its own is describing either a very simple supply chain or a very optimistic roadmap.
We chose the open route, and we will keep building on it.