Intermodal container hand-offs experience intense friction due to competing stakeholder operational processes, the lack of system interoperability, manual user interfaces, and data integrity issues. This is exemplified by recent legislative activity, regulatory rulemaking, public data initiatives, and projects.
Intermodal operators are commercially incented to create customer value through improved data flows. A single version of truth for visibility data exists — it lies within the executional systems and toolsets, currently deployed across operations at arm’s length. Focus on establishing real-time messaging and communication standards between operational systems of record will most efficiently and cost effectively drive information sharing.
Far more than just visibility, timely data flows feed executional toolsets and automation, expediting freight movement. This information organically gains integrity as data gaps are rejected, managed, and cleansed when exceptions emerge.
Each supply chain participant works independently to optimize capacity with a shared goal of speeding profitable container movement. However, an optimal process for one party often suboptimizes the other, creating inefficient manual exception handling as the norm.
Forward industry initiatives will ultimately establish standard data definitions and timing expectations. Proactive incentives to interconnect existing decentralized operating systems will trump the building of central “Death Star” data repositories. In this way, an “Information Highway” emerges as a switchboard vs. a rest stop. If data comes to rest in a centralized data store, even for a moment, latency and decay materializes and places all dependent parties at risk.
Operational necessities force data integrity within the executional systems of record. Access to instantaneous actionable information, as opposed to “rested” data, gives intermodal stakeholders the ability to leverage applications, tools, and automated processes, fed in real-time, to become more of a direct controlling party to the freight orchestration. Commercial value will be created as operational layers are removed and executional decision-making shifts to the appropriate parties.