A few weeks ago, we announced our latest video series devoted to shippers’ key challenges in ocean freight management. Ship Shape examines critical pain points for ocean shippers, including visibility, accumulating demurrage and detention fees, macroeconomic disruptions, climate change and more.
FourKites’ VP of Product for International Solutions, Chris Stauber, examines the critical challenges and recommendations for visibility to mitigate these pain points. These included:
As a boot camp of sorts for ocean shippers, the six videos in the Ship Shape series provided numerous recommendations to mitigate these key ocean freight challenges. What are the key takeaways for busy supply chain professionals? According to Stauber:
- Visibility is more than dots on a map. Shippers need end-to-end multimodal visibility to understand where their containers are, when they will actually arrive through accurate ETAs and fully connected legs for a complete picture of the full multimodal journey.
- Visibility solutions are not all created equal. There are many definitions of what visibility can mean in the supply chain industry and just because you are implementing a supply chain visibility solution does not mean it will mitigate your pain points. Stauber says to look for end-to-end visibility that focuses on multimodality, connects each leg for the complete journey and provides precise and accurate predictive ETAs.
- There are opportunities to reduce unnecessary demurrage and detention fees. You are not alone when it comes to astronomical demurrage and detention fees affecting your transportation costs. According to a White House fact sheet, the FMC estimates that from July to September of 2021, eight of the largest carriers charged customers fees totaling $2.2 billion—a 50% increase on the previous three-month period. Shippers can proactively prioritize containers that are about to incur demurrage and detention fees by using demurrage and detention dashboards and analytics, real-time notifications and predictive ETAs,.
- You can’t prevent macro challenges or disruptions, but you can add resiliency to your supply chain. Events like the carrier consolidation, astronomical container prices, labor shortages and COVID shutdowns will continue to occur, but shippers are looking at their supply chain via visibility solutions to parse out trends affecting their supply chain. Dashboards and analytics allow shippers to use this actionable intelligence to optimize their supply chain.
- Climate change is an area all shippers are considering when it comes to their international supply chain. More frequent weather-related events have disrupted the supply chain and to make matters worse, ocean vessels make up 3% of the world’s total carbon emissions. Shippers have taken steps to reduce these emissions, which has the added benefit of cost savings.
As we’ve said before, the companies that will survive and thrive going forward will continue to leverage the latest and best technologies to remediate both the day-to-day challenges and plan for the long term.
Are you ready to learn more about FourKites’ ocean freight visibility solution, Dynamic Ocean? Click here.
