As the industry continues to focus on building larger ships and expanding ports to serve these vessels, those in the world of e-commerce are working in contrary we are working to make assets smaller.
Industrywide adoption of e-commerce, the information that drives the movement of containerized freight, has gone digital. When digitized, data can be centralized, readable and very small. When industry information goes digital, four great opportunities are created for all of us:
Efficiency. Ocean carriers that use an ocean portal can realize an efficiency improvement of up to 40 percent in the production of customer-facing documents.
Velocity. Not so long ago, a bill of lading could take days to produce and deliver, and results varied by location and customer. Today, carriers using e-commerce can create a bill and deliver it anywhere in two hours, every time.
Business intelligence. How many carrier organizations would like to know their turnaround time for an accurate, final bill of lading by region, by time period, by customer and compared to the competition? Business intelligence tools improve performance for global enterprises in a measurable, sustainable and controllable manner.
Superior performance. After carriers realize improvements in efficiency, velocity and business intelligence, their customers realize better financial performance. Loyal customers will no longer be ones you merely ship freight for, but rather ones whose performance you improve.
Economies of scale require that ships and ports get larger, but the world of e-commerce is getting smaller. The continual advancement of e-commerce can bring the container industry the same improvements that containers brought to bulk shipping not by making things larger, but by making things smaller.