It’s certainly been an interesting past few months in the container shipping industry; from the upcoming IMO 2020 Low Sulphur Fuel requirements, Brexit (Yikes!), US-China tariff negotiations; it’s refreshing to get back to basics and talk about the container industry.
However, today the container business seems to be more logistical than purely shipping.
Major delays in the supply chain of late have made it apparent that enhanced container visibility and supply chain management is needed. Although many of the reasons behind such recent delays — and the subsequent domino effect they produced — are not controllable, there are ways to improve the process.
Below is a brief look into a few of the hindrances affecting the supply chain, as well as how a more proactive data-gathering approach can be used to improve container visibility and container management.
Over the years, the explosion of trade around the world has resulted in the expansion of the infrastructure required to move goods around the world. There are several components to moving freight globally on container ships and independent firms compete for each portion of this traffic.
Transportation is a commodity so the only real factors for customers to consider are cost and time. Of course, you have to assume that in either case your goods will arrive safely, but any part of the logistics chain that can’t handle the freight without damage won’t stay in business for long.
The vast majority of global trade of consumer goods travels in ever larger container ships. Naturally, each portion of the supply chain will look for economies of scale wherever they can.
But bigger has its challenges and not every port can handle the bigger ships resulting in investments at port facilities in larger and larger cranes.