- The startup ShipChain expects vehicle tracking pilot project with Perdue Farms to be fully operational by 2020.
- Venture capital invested more than $3.3 billion between 2012 to 2017 in ‘Digital Shipping and Logistics Startups’.
- Freightos raised $94 million in venture funding from GE Ventures, ICV, Aleph and,SGX.
- Project44 raised $45 million from VCs, led by Sapphire Ventures in October, and acquired the Danish technology company GateHouse Logistics in December 2018.
- There continues to be a growing demand among shippers for technological enhancements.
Is it a revolution, evolution or simply technology oozing into an undeveloped segment of the economy? The ‘Internet of Shipping’ is a real phenomenon that stands to completely rewrite business in the logistics sector among other, reports Ajot.
Container Disappears
In early 2017, a container traveling from Shenzhen, China to a fulfillment center in Greenville, SC, disappeared. “It was a nightmare,” explained the center’s owner, John Monarch. No one knew the container’s location. The forwarders were yelling at the transporters. Monarch was yelling at the forwarders. The client was yelling at Monarch.
Then, one day, the container magically appeared at the fulfillment center’s loading dock, along with a bill for demurrage. It had been languishing at a Port for weeks. “We had no idea because no one had ever communicated it to us,” said Monarch.
John Monarch – ShipChain
The Birth of ShipChain
That misadventure led Monarch and a group of friends to create ShipChain, a startup that is attempting to use blockchain technology to bring some order, transparency, communication, and analytics to the unwieldy and opaque world of freight-related transport. The company, Monarch said, has just completed a pilot project with Perdue Farms, which involves vehicle tracking, and expects to be fully operational next year.
Potential for Venture Capitalists
ShipChain is just one of the dozen startups now competing with a few of the more well-established companies and vehicles and vessels themselves in this arena of logistics technology. According to Monarch, earlier people didn’t see the freight industry as sexy or a place for tech startups. Now, people have begun to recognize its importance, size and the need to help.
Venture capital is pouring into this corner of the technology world. According to Boston Consulting, venture capital invested from early 2012 until late 2017 more than $3.3 billion in what the consultants called ‘Digital Shipping and Logistics Startups’, with a significant portion going into road freight-related technologies.
Aggressive Investments
Some of these ventures are quite ambitious and aggressive. The online global shipping portal Freightos, for example, has raised a total of $94 million in venture funding from GE Ventures, ICV, Aleph and, most recently, SGX, the Singapore stock exchange. Project44 which aims to connect, automate and provide visibility into key transportation processes, said in October that it had raised in its latest round $45 million from VCs, led by Sapphire Ventures. Two months later, it announced it had acquired the Danish technology company GateHouse Logistics.
The Imitation Game Begins
Private equity, which has become increasingly enamored with logistics, is beginning to follow in venture’s footsteps. Insight Venture Partners owns the software company E2open LLC. In October, E2open acquired both Inttra Inc., the industry’s largest ocean vessel ship booking platform, as well as Cloud Logistics, a transportation management systems provider.
Where is the scope for technical progress?
There are, of course, many elements of freight-related transport technology – hardware and software, systems that do everything from tracking a shipment to ensuring that carriers are paid in a timely manner. Some of this new tech is landlocked, others are aimed at ships, while still others can span oceans, railroads, and highways. Some are geography-specific. A few are attempting to enable technology and solutions that are global. Some try to tweak one part of the process, while others attempt to ride herd over the entire journey of a container from the time it leaves a factory until the time it is unloaded in a warehouse.
Revolution or Accelerated Evolution?
Over the next weeks and months, American Journal of Transportation will attempt to make sense of what’s out there, what is coming, what needs to be done, where the hype is, and where the resistance is as well. They plan to tackle the various technologies to give readers a sense of this fast-moving technology arena.
Tommy Barnes – Project44
A Forced Willingness
“We’ve got an industry that’s willing to change but also is being forced to change,” said Tommy Barnes, president of the transportation technology provider Project44. Needless to say, this can be an unruly field, with lots of moving parts, some moving more swiftly than others.
Lars Jensen, the container shipping industry veteran who now heads SeaIntelligence Consulting explained that there are many different avenues, a number of different things happening at the same time. There’s a difference between the tools and techniques being developed to help reduce costs and the tools and techniques being developed to actually try to move the sales process itself into the digital era.
An Antique Industry
What’s astounding is just how far behind the systems technology curve, much of freight transport finds itself. Sea-bound cargo pricing remains unbinding and subject to the whims of both shippers and vessel operators. Jensen said he likens this to horse-trading in the 1700s. ‘Can you give me a quote? That’s too high. I’m your best friend.’
Lars Jensen – SeaIntelligence Consulting
Barnes, whose company provides technology to shippers, freight forwarders and transporters alike, agrees that this is an industry which remains stuck in antiquated methods and procedures. “It started with people chiseling in rock that bill of lading,” he quipped. “Today, it feels like some people are using a chiseled rock for bill applications for shipment. There are a lot of things that are still very old.”
The Anomaly of the Digital Age
Zvi Schneider, Freightos CEO, who cited the paradox of air cargo finds it very strange indeed that the airlines were good innovators on the passenger side. American airlines started electronic booking of passengers in the 60s. However, they are still booking cargo with paper.
Many shippers find that gap incomprehensible, especially in this age of digital ubiquity and of Amazon, when all of us can so easily track where that Christmas gift is we just ordered for our favorite niece or uncle. In almost every other industry, invoicing, for example, has been digitized for years; online sales are old hat.
Zvi Shneider – CEO of Freightos
A Demand for Lucidity
As supply chains have grown ever more complex, far-flung, interactive and sophisticated, the software managing all these tasks has matured as well. However, in the middle of this detailed data tracking and predictive analytics is a container voyage that is a weeks-long leap of faith. As Michael Farlekas, CEO of E2open likes to call it – a black hole.
Many shippers are pressuring for, at the very least, more transparency. Most may not care about the intricacies of the journey, but, more and more, they want to know more than just the overall cost and the proposed length of time. They increasingly want to have a detailed breakdown of expenses and immediate access to where a shipment is and in what condition; and they’re most concerned with what Barnes terms as the exception information, expectations of how many containers will be late, by how much and how that will impact inventory.
Where is the problem?
“Information is one thing, but how do you use it more effectively rather than talk about it,” said Barnes.
A Spaghetti Network of Information
That is easier said than done, with shipping lines or trucking companies often standing in the way, not because of an inability to track a container, but the difficulties in communicating all that data. Add to that the fractured nature of shipping itself. A single container can pass through multiple vehicles and vessels, none of which are necessarily linked. A freight forwarder or 3PL is supposed to keep track of the process but is limited to what is being provided by the carriers.
Anachronistic Backend Systems
Jensen reports that shippers increasingly expect that they are provided with relevant data and functionality to feed into systems, by their suppliers, which includes freight suppliers. To comply with such functionality shipping companies need to review many of their systems. This is where many of the carriers have a challenge because their backend systems are antiquated.
Information Impediment
Add to this a huge information bottleneck – the ports. “Seventy-plus percent of the delays are in the ports themselves, not on the water,” Barnes pointed out, adding that port management systems make surface transportation-related systems look relatively simple. He goes on to say that, the good news is in the amount of waste that exists; the port network is massive. So the opportunity for folks to be more efficient quickly is there, once you hop over that first hurdle.
Paper- The Lowest Common Denominator
As those in logistics are well aware, freight-related transport continues to drown in paper. The startup Vector has developed a mobile app that automates reporting from a truck driver to the back office and another app from the back office to the customer. Paraphrasing Will Chu, Vector’s co-founder, and CEO, the fragmented nature of trucking means that when a guy shows up at the docks, the easiest thing to give him is paper. That paper can go back to the back office for further invoicing. It’s the lowest common denominator. Chu discovered this in conversations with a friend who was being groomed to take over his family’s flatbed trucking business. “I was surprised, but I saw an opportunity to add more value to enable the automation that everyone wants.”
Will Chu – CEO of Vector
A Matter of Promptness
Transportation tracking technology is certainly widespread and available. Yet, shippers, who are pressuring for change, have been frustrated in efforts at obtaining that information in any kind of timely manner.
David Lemont, the CEO of transportation management systems developer Kuebix explains the expectations of a shipper; the shipper says [to its freight forwarder] ‘I need to know where is my product. And I want my invoice electronically. And I want to read directly off the Web site. I want to be able to keep track of every transaction with you. And I don’t want to call you anymore,’.
David Lemont – CEO of Kuebix
Is there a possibility of achieving more?
That’s where these technology providers see a huge opening, not only in supplying shippers and their freight forwarders with data and in a timely fashion, but in interpreting that data.
Lemont says that systems like theirs provide analytics and dashboards that accumulate all this information for analysis. Then one can also add a planning function. They have modules that allow one to consolidate shipments, optimize the routes that are taken, the least expensive, least amount of mileage, scheduling its arrival and managing it. They keep track of the costs every step of the way.
The Final Link
Creating the technology to link all these disparate elements isn’t easy. Take Freightos, which now offers pricing automation software to freight forwarders as well as provides shippers with an online marketplace and instant price comparisons on international shipping. Freightos just announced that CMA CGM will be the first ocean carrier to list on the online service, which offers guaranteed pricing and capacity.
Schneider recollects that there’s infact no standard way to get all the rates from the ocean liners, the airlines, and the trucking companies. What they’ve had to do is collect well over 100,000 Excel sheets, in different languages, different currencies. Collecting the data, the business rules for all the prices and the fees and the surcharges is a very, very complex job and they’ve raised a lot of capital in order to take on a big task like that.
Can we automate everything?
Resistance is beginning to melt away. It’s expected that technology in freight-related transport and its acceptance will accelerate, although it will take some years for online shipping to fully resemble, say, online airline booking. And then?
“If you look at this five, eight years down the line, I’m pretty sure that everything that can be automated and digitized will be automated and digitized. The ones that don’t they will cease to exist because they won’t be competitive on cost. It’s as simple as that,” concludes Jensen.
But that, he believes, creates its own dilemma, a lack of differentiation between services. The real question is: What is it that we can’t automate and why? That will be the source of the value-add. That will be the source of the profit.
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Source: Ajot
