New Innovative Tools Revolutionizing Ocean Shipping
1/11/24
As containerization of cargo took hold starting in the late 1950’s, it enabled a massive shift to a global economy and the movement to offshoring the manufacturing of goods. This coincided with the rapid growth of economies like China and India. Along with this globalization and the resulting dramatic lengthening of the supply chain, the need to carefully plan inventory demand with 9–12-month lead times became the new normal. Businesses with a heavy seasonal sales cycle from Thanksgiving to New Year had to start merchandise planning in February/March and placement of offshore orders by May/June, with receipts in August/September. Unanticipated demand, the wrong mix of products, or delays in the delivery of goods resulted in very costly consequences for US based businesses such as lost revenues and excessive costs.
The longest part of the journey for goods coming in from offshore locations is the time on the ocean from origination port to destination port. Environmental factors have a major impact on the conditions of those goods; they can cause damages, spoilage, or delays. It is therefore critically important for businesses to have visibility not only into where their goods are in the journey to the destination port, but also into potential issues affecting the timing of arrival that could materially impact their sales plan. ESP Ocean is one such tool, providing visibility into where your goods are and projecting forward to anticipate issues.
ESP Ocean is a powerful analytics platform that goes beyond real-time location tracking on goods- its strength lies in predicting disruption and recommending solutions on how to mitigate the risk. Powerful embedded analytics and machine learning are applied to the anticipated movement of the ocean carrier considering historical flow patterns, current and projected weather impacts, geopolitical risks, seasonal peaks, shipping lane, and port congestion. These elements enable ESP Ocean to provide estimated ETAs, dwell time at port before getting a berth, potentially missed transit points to another ship, and many other costly impacts.
OCEAN SIDE
DRILL DOWN ONE LEVEL TO INDIVIDUAL BOL / CONTAINER
Detailed dashboard showing Bill of Lading (BOL)/container status.
Ability to toggle between map views and detention & demurrage.
Data view is tailorable toward your preferences in tables, charts and maps.
Customers can track key status such as Gate out Empty Container, Gate in at Load Port Terminal, Origin Container Fully Loaded on Board, Origin Departed, Current Progress on Ocean, Destination Arrived, and Fully Unloaded Container at Destination.
ESP Ocean combines ESP’s proprietary algorithms, machine learning and data integration capabilities with partners Esri’s best in industry mapping capabilities and Spire’s AIS and weather forecasting capabilities. Besides real-time data, customers have access to five years’ worth of historical ship intelligence around the world, from origination to destination, port by port, including seasonal impacts due to congestion, dwell times awaiting a berth for offloading, and weather impacts.
A robust two-way communications tool takes the insights generated by the ESP platform, and using Large Language Model AI, messages out to key stakeholders the shipment status and alerts them to real-time and potential upcoming issues in the movement of goods, as well as gives recommendations on actions to avoid those issues well in advance.
RANKING OF LATE SHIPMENTS WITH DRILL DOWN CAPABILITIES
Identify late shipments and why they are late.
ESP’s Notify platform has capabilities to send out the alerts to remote locations.
The flexible user experience enables custom configuration of key metrics and alerts for customer specific KPI’s including tables, mapping, and charts, all as defined by customer needs.
Whether you’re a freight forwarder or a cargo owner, ESP Ocean provides material benefits to your operations. For freight forwarders, ESP gives you a competitive advantage in providing your customers with powerful insights into the flow of their goods, as well as giving them the ability to check on their own status of goods. For cargo owners, you can manage your merchandise and sales planning more effectively. Please reach out to ESP if you would like to get a demonstration of the ESP Ocean platform.
AUTHOR
Dan Pimentel, President & Chief Financial Officer
Dan is the Co-Founder of ESP Logistics Technology and Managing Director / CFO of Saybrook, a Private Equity firm that invests in logistics and supply chain assets. Dan’s experience includes 10 years of supply chain logistics strategic and operational planning and global ERP systems implementation.
About ESP
ESP was created by combining over 20 years of supply chain and logistics expertise with technologists that have focused on the science of location and location analytics, the practice of layering geographic data along with business data to extract valuable insights. The advantage that our customers have with ESP is the ability to access and capitalize on a continuously growing infrastructure that enables more focused location-based analytics, helping the supply chain become smarter. ESP has designed a Space and Time Network which enables data (real-time, historic and near real-time) to be consumed, analyzed, viewed, and translated into action. Critical to our customers’ success, our network enables the analyzation of data sets that are beyond typical supply chain data, resulting in more accurate and actionable information.