Increasing Real-Time Container Tracking from 5% to 95%
Recently I had a conversation with a $10B+ publicly traded customer, who’s been working with Gnosis Freight for about 8 months as of this writing.
When I asked them why they decided to start using Gnosis they said, “we just wanted to be able to track containers” and preceded to explain what they were dealing with.
Prior to Gnosis they estimated that they knew where 5% of their containers were at any time. They would get reports and Excel spreadsheets from their NVOCCs and Freight Forwarders that would provide an initial ETA when a container was booked. Unfortunately, the ETAs they were being provided weren’t accurate, and wouldn’t get updated over time. This led to a lot of challenges internally when shipments weren’t arriving as expected.
Questions would come up from others in the company saying, "The port website has a different date than the NVOCC is publishing. Why is that?"
That's not an easy question to answer, especially when you're not sure why yourself.
Because of this giant blind spot, they decided to see if Gnosis Freight could help.
Starting with Gnosis they had two primary goals. First, they wanted accurate real-time data about when their containers should arrive at port, ATAs (actual time of arrival), and Container Available milestones, to help with scheduling drayage and reducing costs.
Second, they wanted to track every single one of their shipping containers no matter where it was in the world even after it reached the Port of Discharge.
By utilizing Gnosis’ Container Lifecycle Management™ Platform (“CLM Platform”) and working with their Gnosis account management team, they’ve now been able to increase their shipping container visibility to about 95%.
The other 5%? Those are containers the logistics team don’t even know about. Someone in the company ordered something from a supplier who is paying for the freight on the shipment and using their own Freight Forwarder.
“We started with very little, and we’ve ended up with accurate container milestones, great knowledge about where our containers are, and we’ve tied our drayage carriers in to keep everything in one database.”
Whether the customer is submitting a single MBL (Master Bill of Lading) themselves or a Freight Forwarder is sending hundreds or thousands at a time in an Excel file, or other means such as API, Gnosis standardizes the details of all the customers active shipping containers globally into their CLM platform.
And thanks to Gnosis’ proprietary Marlo™ freight tracking engine aggregating data from the world's ocean carriers, ports, and terminals, and more, they have the most complete and accurate container milestones available, giving them deeper visibility into their container lifecycles and improving their overall supply chain visibility.
“That’s basically our last blind spot, tracking that 5% of containers that we don’t even know about, but working with Gnosis we hope to narrow that down over time.”
Want to learn more about how the Gnosis Container Lifecycle Management platform can help solve the challenges you’re facing with your supply chain?