For too long, ocean carriers have built their service offering around moving a container from Point A to Point B. This mostly meant from one port to another or from one factory/warehouse to another. Most shippers have come to accept this “norm” because that’s the way it has always been done. Unfortunately, it doesn’t allow much for breakthroughs in the areas of speed, efficiency, reliability, or optimization. The goods in the container need to get to a “store shelf” where the end-customer can consume the product, but if the ocean carrier can only handle a part of the supply chain, it doesn’t leave room for innovation.
The real breakthrough technologies in supply chain come from 3PL integrators. They can assess your current operation and come with ideas to lean out your supply chain. Things like DC bypass, ocean/air, 53-foot transloading, origin consolidation, purchase order visibility, exception management, late stage packaging, INCOterms, customs classification optimization, and a host of other tools are readily available at the integrator level. Ocean carriers typically have stayed out of this arena believing it is not part of their core offering. Ocean carriers have wrongly been chasing the “market share rainbow” for too long.
That has all changed in the past six months with the recent announcements by Maersk and CMA CGM. It appears now that these companies will embrace their 3PL partnerships/sister companies (Damco and CEVA, respectively).
In the parcel world, both FedEx and UPS have used their assets to bring door-to-door solutions to their customer base. By using their warehouses, planes, trucks, and people knowledge, they are able to design customer-specific solutions for almost any scenario. Now Maersk and CMA CGM, two of the largest ocean freight owner/operators, are starting to develop similar strategies. While not a new technology per se, this is still a major breakthrough for such a traditional industry. Now if only the other major ocean carriers can embrace this new frontier, we may indeed see a new era in ocean shipping.