Internal Shipments Filter
Understand why excluding internal shipments can improve the quality of your customer and sourcing insights.
What are internal shipments?
Internal shipments are movements between entities that are part of the same corporate group or vertically integrated structure, such as IKEA → IKEA Netherlands. These shipments do not represent true external purchasing activity. From a company profile the counterparty may appear as an internal supplier; from a supplier profile it may appear as an internal company — that is why we call them internal shipments.
Example: IKEA shipping goods to IKEA Netherlands is internal movement, not a real supplier-to-customer relationship.
Why excluding them is useful
- Improves accuracy of supplier analysis
- Removes artificial or internal transfers
- Helps identify real external vendors
- Makes customer purchasing behavior clearer
- Reduces noise in supply chain data
When you should NOT exclude them
- When analyzing full corporate logistics flows
- When studying distribution networks or internal routing
- When researching warehouse or regional stock movement
In some cases, internal shipment flows are valuable for understanding how a company distributes inventory across regions and fulfillment centers.
Best practice
Use the internal shipments filter when your goal is to analyze real purchasing relationships, and disable it when you want to study logistics or internal distribution patterns.