Newsletter 17/2023: Transit time of sea shipments is unstable again

In the last edition of our regular newsletter we informed you about our digital plans for 2024.

 

The current situation, where shipowners are diverting ships to safer routes around Africa under pressure from attacks on cargo ships in the Gulf of Aden, means that liner shipping schedules are once again being disrupted. It is almost certain that many ports will experience congestion as a result of multiple ships arriving at the same time. This will not only affect the unloading of ships sailing on routes between Europe and Asia, but also on routes between Europe and North and South America. Ships will simply have to queue up for clearance at ports.
At a time when timetables cannot be relied upon, it is doubly important to have the most accurate - and continuously updated - information on the expected arrival of your shipment at the port of destination.

 

The ETA (Estimated Time of Arrival) of the ship to the port of destination has been updated to date based on information from the shipowner. Towards the end of this year, thanks to the connection to the Fourkites platform, we will also provide so-called predictive or dynamic ETAs.
This is the use of artificial intelligence to specify the date of arrival of a container at a port based on a number of dynamic parameters and current conditions (weather, congestion on the way, ship position and speed, etc.). This functionality was originally planned to be launched in the new version of eSTONE.

 

However, given the heated situation, we decided that now is the right time to run this specific feature in the background of the current version of eSTONE. The predictive ETA should help to better plan the delivery of shipments and the possible delivery of critical quantities of materials or products by other, more reliable means (air or rail) in the chaos to come.
We have therefore added a dynamic ETA field to your client interface so that you can have a more accurate ETA prediction in addition to the standard ("shipping") ETA.

 

You'll have better control over your shipments and therefore be able to activate your supply chain backup solution more flexibly.