MarineTraffic APP Became Big News In The Supply Chain

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Marine traffic is an app that has been around for some time offering the basics like ship positions and identification and not much else. I used to use this years ago back in 2008 to gauge and plan my production lines regarding time of arrivals.

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This has taken MarineTraffic 15 years to get to this point, but now offer a much needed service.

This was rather basic but at least I could tell if shipping agents were talking nonsense as in many cases I knew more than they did. If something was urgent I made sure there were no delays as I knew my cargo had already landed by following the shipping information. Chasing agents who were unaware the container was already offloaded and waiting collection was the most frustrating thing in those days.

This was really basic and was only using what was available at the time and knew no one using this type of info. This is changing now as MarineTraffic has developed and upgraded the services they provide by launching Visibility For Containers.

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What they have done is take your container details and the estimated time of arrival by your shipping agent and included the "reality" to the final ETA. This includes vessel delays on pick up and factoring in congestion at the final port of destination giving you a real time delivery date. They are using the information gathered by their satellite feeds to calculate the timings precisely and updating continuously.

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This app is going to literally print money as the services it provides is that valuable.

This is crucial for any company and why the uptake of this app the big retail companies has been phenomenal. Information is key to any type of planning especially if your business is seasonal and has to hit certain timings to be successful.

To give you an idea of how far ahead these big companies are planning Christmas orders start landing from August and if they don't land by mid November those items have missed the cut off date for delivery. Turn around time from off loading into a major retail warehouse at peak period is roughly 6 weeks. There would have been total chaos and pandemonium over the last 2 Christmases with delayed shipments the story of the day.

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Once you have the bill of lading from the vessel stating they are in receipt of your goods you just track it using the app after filling in all the required info.

This MarineTraffic app makes perfect sense and if I was still in the retail game is something I would have signed up for. I am not a techie by any means but do believe one thing and that information is the most valuable asset a business requires to function properly. Delays not only cause bottlenecks, but cost millions of dollars to rectify as once the wheels come off they rarely go back on until the rush is over.

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Walmart used to waste millions of dollars back in the day by not tracking their containers properly and this was all down to the buyer and their planner involved in that department. I was fortunate as the scale I had was far smaller and at anyone time had no more than 200 containers on the water. Still it all boils down to the fundamentals of the tools you are using as alternative plans could always be made if problems arose. Demurrage is paid when containers sit around for delivery and those numbers escalate rapidly eating into any profits.

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