Improving Global Rail Container Visibility
To borrow the Thomas Friedman phrase, the world has truly become “flat”—open to all through technology. With this transformation, the humble shipping container has become the backbone of international commerce.
Steamship lines carry millions of containers loaded with commodities essential to world commerce. Many containers move throughout North America to and from inland destinations by rail. This environment is still subject to visibility gaps.
Without accurate information about container location and events, delivering cargo on time and on budget can be challenging. Centralized visibility across rail carriers with machine learning, near-real time dashboards, and critical event data can help ocean carriers close visibility gaps for containers moving on rail.
Spotty Information
Event feeds for rail containers moving can be spotty, and include only a few reporting events after the container leaves the port or the inland ramp before it arrives at the destination. Ocean carriers employing several rail carriers also bear the burden of having to use multiple websites to gain information on container location.
Having access to a centralized, trusted source of granular movement information can provide ocean carriers with enhanced visibility to their shipments, better forecast import arrival information, and provide accurate outbound export volume forecasts.
A granular feed for rail shipments from the West Coast to an inland ramp, for example, should contain 100-150 reported events. For a movement from the East Coast to an inland ramp, 20-40 events should be reported.
With ocean carriers often providing or coordinating the drayage of the import shipment to the end customer, the most important piece of information is the estimated time of arrival (ETA) at the inland destination ramp. This time is closely monitored to coordinate the container pickup with the motor carrier.
In addition to standard ETAs, machine learning techniques can be applied to reevaluate or “re-trip” the ETA during each step of the journey to provide a more accurate arrival time. Re-trip algorithms evaluate the container’s current location, destination, and past lane volumes to more accurately predict an arrival time.
Additional critical events are essential to managing container shipments. Having a centralized resource to track arrival times, estimated times of grounding, pick up numbers, estimated times of notification, actual notifications, last free day, and outgate times helps the ocean carrier avoid costly detention fees for excessively held containers at the inland rail ramp. With relatively tight margins on a shipment, this can be a sizeable cost savings.
Dashboards and Insights
A huge benefit to ocean carrier customer service teams handling end customer shipment details is centralized, real-time event dashboards and insights. These allow customer service teams to set up their own customer-specific insights that accurately track container locations and critical information across multiple railroads.
A single dashboard with multiple insights can be created for each Beneficial Cargo Owner that tracks current locations; estimated arrival times; held, delayed and late containers; containers with notifications in the past; and containers not yet loaded to rail. A schedule option within the dashboards can also be set up to proactively alert to conditions that require attention.
Whether the shipment is an import or an export, better visibility can mitigate downstream impacts to changed ETAs and delayed shipments.