The freight transportation industry must change dramatically in the coming years, and several of the largest challenges depend on increased collaboration among stakeholders, including end-to-end system interoperability, digital transformation of container shipping, and the rollout of a zero-emission fuel.
Digital transformation is fueled by interoperability, which is enabled by open-source standards that provide a common language and format for communication. Such standards need to be global and strongly supported by industry stakeholders and regulators.
Since 2019, the Digital Container Shipping Association (DCSA) and its members have collaborated with industry participants and regulators to gain wide acceptance for digital standards that enable end-to-end interoperability through standardized data exchange. These efforts have focused on some of the most critical needs of container shipping, such as electronic bills of lading (eBL).
Currently, shipping with an original bill of lading requires the manual handover of paper trade documents, which is inefficient, expensive, and error prone. It’s common to find 50 sheets of paper in a package of shipping documents that must be exchanged among, in some cases, 30 different parties. This creates inefficiencies that slow down trade and hamper growth and innovation. DCSA estimates that a 50 percent eBL adoption rate would save the industry roughly $4 billion annually.
Widespread adoption of DCSA standards for eBL, as well as track-and-trace, Internet of Things (IoT), and just-in-time port calls, represents the start of an emerging digital ecosystem that will turn these activities into collaborative, data-driven, digital processes that improve sustainability and slash costs and delays.
Digitally advanced industries such as banking and telecommunications have gone through similar digital transformations, with standards and collaboration as the cornerstone for driving change. Container shipping will achieve similar success by actively collaborating on digitalization to deliver great customer experiences in an increasingly sustainable way.