Order Tracking Dashboard: Seeing Every Order Move In Real Time

Order tracking breaks down when data arrives too late

Customers do not care how complex your operation is. They care about one thing: where their order is and when it will arrive. If your 3PL cannot answer that question instantly, frustration spreads fast. Research shows that more brands now expect real time order tracking dashboards because customer expectations have shifted. Delayed updates, outdated status messages, and vague summaries cost brands credibility and revenue.

Without a real time order tracking dashboard, your teams work harder than they should. Support spends time chasing updates. Operations has to check multiple systems to learn what stage an order is in. Leadership cannot tell whether fulfillment is on track until the damage is already done. Many brands who come to G10 describe this exact struggle: they simply could not see what was happening with their orders while those orders were still in the building.

As Maureen Milligan said, "Most of the customers who come to us from another 3PL, their challenges have always been access to their data, order accuracy and efficiency, and basically just meeting the committed requirements. So we've seen a lot of people come disillusioned by their last 3PL, where their orders weren't getting fulfilled in time, their inventory accuracy was not there, and they were not able to satisfy customer orders." A real time order tracking dashboard eliminates those blind spots.

An order tracking dashboard needs event-level visibility

A dashboard is only useful if the data feeding it is granular and immediate. Order tracking depends on knowing exactly when each task happens. That includes receiving product, picking items, completing packout, labeling, staging, and loading onto a carrier. Without that detail, dashboards become pretty charts with no predictive value.

Bryan Wright described the level of visibility required when he said, "Absolutely. We have portals that show you the data. We have history that shows you all of that tracking. It shows the product landed on the dock at 8 o'clock. At 8:10, John picked it up and took it to location XYZ, and at 10 o'clock, we picked two items off of that pellet in the location 1, 2, 3, 4, order, you know, ABC, and at 11 o'clock, we packed it, we put it in this box and put this label number on it, and all the way through the process onto the truck and to the customer." Real time order tracking dashboards rely on that exact chain of events.

When a dashboard shows each stage as it happens, your team does not wonder whether an order is stuck. They can see precisely where it is and whether it is at risk of delay.

Scan-based workflows make order tracking dashboards accurate

If workers bypass scans or rely on paper, dashboards fall out of sync with reality. Any gap in scanning creates confusion later when you need to understand why an order shipped late or why a parcel never reached packing. Real time order tracking only works when scan discipline is non-negotiable.

As Connor Perkins said, "You want everything to be scanned in the warehouse, nothing done on paper. You can lose a lot of money in this industry by you know having people ship stuff wrong, or store it wrong, and now it's lost somewhere. So having a 3PL and WMS that is 100% scan-based is crucial." That accuracy is what makes an order tracking dashboard reliable instead of misleading.

Connor also explained the pain caused by poor accuracy when he said, "One of the pain points our clients have experienced with previous 3PLSs is inventory accuracy; maybe their previous 3PL wasn't great at picking the orders accurately. So they were losing money by shipping wrong items or wrong quantities of items." When accuracy breaks, dashboards lose their value. Real time tracking prevents that drift.

A real time order tracking dashboard should live inside a portal

A dashboard is not useful if it is hidden in a weekly report or only shown during scheduled calls. Modern brands want live access. They want to see orders progress the moment they move, and they want to do it without requesting updates.

As Maureen said, "We're in the last stages of developing a new portal that will give customers real-time visibility to their on-time order fulfillment, inventory accuracy, and even inventory levels so that they can monitor those things directly in our systems. They'll have visibility to what the statuses of their orders-are they getting processed as they expect?-and things like that." A real time order tracking dashboard is one of the most important pieces of that visibility.

She also said, "A lot of the 3PL customer expectations are that order fulfillment is happening extremely timely, that our inventory is accurate, that we're able to execute on their orders very quickly, and get them shipped the same day. So what these real-time portals provide our customers is 100% visibility. A client might say, 'I had 100 orders come into the system before noon, we're going to fulfill and ship those out today.' And they now have direct visibility to watch that progression throughout the stages of the fulfillment process. They can then make sure that their orders are fulfilled and out the door without having to wait till we send them back a notification that the order is fulfilled." Watching that progress is the whole point of an order tracking dashboard.

Connor described the reporting foundation that supports these dashboards when he said, "Our clients get best-in-class visibility and transparency. They can see their daily orders, they can see KPIs, and they can see historical transactions. They can look at a daily level or go into the more granular version where they're looking at transactional history on an item." An order tracking dashboard sits on top of that data and makes it easy to use.

He added, "You have easy access to reporting and you can export to Excel, or really any format that you like you know directly from our WMS portal." That flexibility turns the dashboard into a planning tool, not just a monitoring tool.

Dashboards turn early warnings into early fixes

Most fulfillment failures start small. A pack station slows down. A batch runs long. A picker falls behind. Without a dashboard, these issues stay unnoticed until the deadline is missed. With real time order tracking, those weak signals become clear.

Leaders can see which orders are at risk and act before customers feel the impact. They can shift labor, rebalance zones, or change priorities in the moment. That agility is what separates operations that scale smoothly from those that constantly scramble.

As Maureen said, "We will take in your inbounds, we will get them received and reported back to you within our SLAs, and oftentimes more quickly than what we contracted for. We will ship your orders out the day they're required. And our inventory accuracy is generally right there at that 99.7% that we agreed. So that's one of the areas where we really do excel, and where we've been able to win business." Real time dashboards help maintain that level of execution.

Order tracking dashboards rebuild trust after bad 3PL experiences

Brands that switch 3PLs often do so because they were left in the dark. They were told everything was fine when it was not. They were given reports that did not match customer experiences. A real time order tracking dashboard removes that uncertainty.

As Maureen said, "For customers who have come to us from a bad 3PL relationship, they experience relief. They're suddenly seeing their business scaling, that the data supports what we agreed to, and then the trust begins to build." Trust grows faster when the truth is visible on a dashboard.

Order tracking dashboards are now the baseline requirement

Fast-growing brands cannot afford to wait for updates or hope their 3PL is on track. They need to see the truth. Real time order tracking dashboards turn fulfillment from a mystery into something measurable, predictable, and manageable.

As Connor said, "This is one of our strengths. G10 is on the cutting edge for this kind of transparency and feedback for clients." That transparency comes to life through the order tracking dashboard.

If you want a fulfillment operation that stays honest, stays fast, and stays aligned with customer expectations, a real time order tracking dashboard is no longer optional. It is the tool that keeps every order visible until the moment it leaves the building.