Ocean visibility lights up Christmas 2021 for retailers and consumers
By Komal Puri | October 13, 2022
Rush, Chaos, Scarcity
Last year’s Christmas season wasn’t decorated with snow but plagued with rush, chaos, and scarcity in the U.S. Though the global economy was recovering from the COVID slump and consumers were willing to splurge on expensive gifts during Black Friday and Christmas sales, the festivity was missing. Sadly, there was a shortage of artificial Christmas trees, which spiked the price by 25%. In this unexpected mad rush, the villain was the infamous ‘Shipping Snarls.’ The port congestion in Los Angeles blacked out the supply of consumer goods from Southeast Asian manufacturers. A mere bump of a few cargo ships in a busy port quickly escalated into one of the world’s largest supply crises. The panic to source goods quickly and first pushed up the demand and the prices.
Undercooked Turkey and Disappointed Santa
There was a shortage of everything; containers, ocean liners, trucks, drivers, and manpower to handle port operations. All these disruptions wreaked havoc on the U.S. retail and e-commerce business. Retailers of all types - superstore, convenience store, big & bulky, discount retail, warehouse retail - struggled to balance the supply and demand of goods. Retail brands came up with workarounds to assuage the shopping anxiety. Target, Ulta Beauty and Gap opened up season sales six weeks ahead of schedule, so shoppers did not get disappointed with empty shelves. The e-commerce big boy Amazon went a step ahead; increased ports of entry by 50% across all networks and doubled container processing capacity. Despite these makeshift ideas, in the end, the proverbial turkey was undercooked and Santa ran out of gifts for everyone. The biggest shopping season of the year was compromised.
FarEye Brings Cheer to Retailers and Consumers
Christmas 2022 looks brighter, beautiful and happy for everyone. At FarEye, we’ve added ocean visibility and shipment tracking capabilities to our platform. These capabilities will help retailers track their orders literally across sea routes, access weather feeds and see congestion in major seaports, monitor delays in trans-shipment transfers, analyze the performance of ocean carriers and a lot more.
Actionable Visibility with Real-Time Ocean Freight Tracking
Retailers and supply chain managers can track their ocean shipments in real-time from POL (point of loading) to POD (point of destination) at every step of the sea journey. FarEye’s container movement tracking capability helps locate choke points across multi-carrier trans-shipment movements, resolve bottlenecks, and ensure shipments on-time arrival without delays. Our pre-integrated multimodal - air, ocean, rail and road - carrier network covers more than 90% of global movements, which aptly aids in shipment tracking beyond the ocean and on-time delivery of goods.
Get Accurate ETAs with Ocean Route Performance Analysis
Global enterprises deal with ocean freight logistics that travel through various sea routes and ports owned by multiple countries. This translates into numerous customs handling, legislation restrictions, and regional weather fluctuations. Our platform captures data points such as weather feeds and congestion in global ports in near real-time. The sea route performance capability allows logistics managers to track delays or expected congestion in a particular sea route and monitor ETAs. This will help avoid disruptions in downstream planning, mid-mile transfers and last-mile capacity planning.
Leverage Profitable Sea Vessels with Transporter Performance Monitoring
Transporter performance capability allows logistics managers to analyze the performance of various third-party ocean carriers on critical parameters such as exceptions handled and on-time arrival vs delayed scores, and more. You can identify top-performing shipping carriers based on ETA scorecards. If there are any slippages in agreed SLAs, enterprises can use this data and negotiate tariffs to minimize transportation costs.
Improve Operations, Avoid Demurrage and Reduce Detention Costs
Improve the operational efficiency of your ocean logistics with dashboards and alert reports. Monitor key performance indicators of each vessel carrier, such as POL, POD, and trans-shipment turnaround times and identify top-performing carriers. Get actionable and accurate alerts on on-time arrival or delays of shipments at ports and manage container transfers and truck pickups accordingly. This will help avoid demurrage and detention costs.
Ocean Visibility Boosts Omnichannel Retail Growth
Ocean visibility is the logistics backbone of omnichannel retail growth. Disruptions in ocean cargo movement can turn into ‘sour moments’ for global retailers and e-commerce companies. One of the many benefits of ocean visibility is gaining knowledge on the real-time ETA of a container or specific shipment arrival at destinations. This data is imperative to design downstream planning, including last-mile delivery of orders to consumers at their doorstep. Retailers and brands can maintain a high On-Time Delivery (OTD) rate, critical metric that contributes to higher CSAT scores, only when they gain complete logistics visibility of their shipments, from manufacturers to consumers. And ocean visibility plays a vital role in empowering retailers with the visibility and insights to steer their ship forward.
Komal Puri is a seasoned professional in the logistics and supply chain industry. As the Senior Director of Marketing and a subject matter expert at FarEye, she has been instrumental in shaping the industry narrative for the past decade. Her expertise and insights have earned her numerous awards and recognition. Komal’s writings reflect her deep understanding of the industry, offering valuable insights and thought leadership.
