It is not a secret that ocean shipping is the most popular and cost-effective method of delivering products today. Day by day, lots of trade goods are shipped by sea from one point of the world to another. However, due to the absence of data harmonization, visibility and transparency across the industry, ocean shipping still lacks efficient routing and utilization of logistics assets and infrastructure.
Although IoT and other technologies recently emerged from the global maritime shipping industry's digitization can slightly improve the situation, the industry is far from the required excellence.
To make logistic operations really efficient, actors of the industry, such as shipping lines, ports, terminals, freight forwarders, hinterland carriers, and BCOs, need to be connected with each other to share valuable information about shipments statuses and related commercial documents in near as real-time as possible.
Due to the complexity of the modern logistic chains and the fact that some actors involved in the shipment process lack the ability to be fully integrated with business partners, achieving full visibility and transparency of data moving between parties is still problematic.
The main reasons behind the inefficiency are lack of common data standards for the industry and outdated operational approaches based on legacy data systems and manual document handling.
Surprisingly, a significant number of industry actors are still heavily relying on aging infrastructure and technologies developed decades ago that, as a rule, are not capable of exchanging information in real-time by any means.
In today’s competitive global environment, companies that are agile enough to timely address these challenges will get operational efficiency and competitive advantage, allowing them to stay in the game and not get out of the business.
The TradeLens platform jointly developed by IBM and Maersk is one of the solutions enabling information sharing and collaboration between industry actors. All the parties engaged with the platform can share information in real-time with the entire ecosystem to gain efficiency and improve asset utilization, which will definitely increase transparency and collaboration across the industry and, as a result, increase the efficiency of the ocean shipping industry.
Although the TradeLens provides a lot of value for the industry and its actors, its adoption still requires a certain level of knowledge and know-how, which means that to enjoy the ecosystem's benefits, the actors still need to make significant efforts to be connected to the platform.
One of the ways to connect to the platform is to do integration in-house. In this case, you need to already have or hire a team of integration experts who will do the job. These resources must of course also have the bandwidth to do the job. As a rule, in-house option is usually viable for bigger enterprises that have bigger budgets, resources and are ready to take risks associated with in-house integrations. You can learn more about the risks here.
Suppose you are not ready to take neither financial nor administrative burden. In that case, you should choose a wiser way of integrations - partnering with data integration vendors that have expertise in Logistics and Supply chain data integrations.
As a rule, such companies have the best teams and experience and rely on cloud-based technologies, enabling industry stakeholders to deploy integrations with the platform in a brief period of time.
Recently, Youredi, the leading provider of integration solutions for the Logistics and Supply chain industry, and TradeLens proudly announced the joint initiative to provide data connectivity services helping actors of the ocean shipping industry connect to the TradeLens ecosystem. As a result, Youredi’s TradeLens integration solution can be the best choice for your business today.
The service we provide is entirely cloud-based and has a form of a layer added to clients’ existing systems, whether it is cloud systems, apps, or legacy systems, that are quite common in the global ocean shipping industry. Connecting to the ecosystem with us does not require any changes on your side. The Youredi solution takes care of the data translation, so you can always send and receive data in your preferred data standard or format. The solution can work both with structured (rich data) and unstructured (PDFs, scans, images) data. Whenever it’s necessary, we also provide data validation and data enrichment logic.
The service is fully managed, meaning that we will take care of the whole process from the design phase through deployment to maintenance. Customers don’t have to worry about API developments or upgrades either.
An additional benefit of the service is a predictable cost. We offer a subscription model that implies a one-time setup fee and a monthly payment that depends on the number of events. To learn about pricing and the benefits you will get working with us, please contact us at talktous@youredi.com.