Amidst ocean chaos, supply chain disruptions and COVID-19 outbreaks at ports, managing ocean shipments is a growing challenge, especially as consumer demand for goods continues to surge. While it’s impossible to control mother nature, having an accurate and precise estimated time of arrival (ETA) can significantly improve inventory management and customer satisfaction for shippers, large and small.
It wasn’t too long ago that the EVERGIVEN vessel and its cargo was stuck in the Suez Canal. While the world watched as the vessel was slowly dislodged, shippers across the globe were wondering, “Is my cargo on that ship? Will my cargo be late to its final destination?”
And the continued ocean chaos has made things much harder for supply chain managers – especially those who must deal with unhappy customers when the full product does not arrive on time and without an explanation.
Late shipments can trigger countless emails and phone calls between ocean carriers and their customers. Not only is this a headache for the shipper, but it is also inefficient, especially when hundreds of shipments are affected.
While reliably predicting the weather remains elusive, accurately predicting a shipment’s ETA is not. For example, FourKites’ new Dynamic ETA for Ocean provides real-time, automated and predictive ETAs that are 20% to 40% more accurate than carrier-generated ETAs. This new AI-driven capability is based on FourKites’ patented Smart Forecasted Arrival technology and brings together voyage and routing data and captain data, alongside more than 5TB of historical Automatic Identification System (AIS) vessel data and 6 million port-to-port trips across 100,000 lanes worldwide over the last two years.
However, reliably knowing the ETA of a shipment is half the battle. Proactively communicating delivery updates to customers is a must to avoid the endless track-and-trace phone calls and emails. Thankfully, real-time visibility solutions like FourKites can make it easy to sign up for alerts and receive notifications when any shipment is delayed. In fact, FourKites’ Dynamic ETA will catch late loads 2.5x faster than carrier ETAs.
If your organization relies on carrier ETAs, that may not be sufficient for your supply chain operations. Carrier ETAs can be delayed, inaccurate or fail to update milestones until it is too late.
FourKites recently introduced Dynamic ETA for Ocean, the industry-leading predictive ETA powered by our machine learning algorithm. This is a significant innovation as part of our Dynamic Ocean offering, providing shippers, carriers and 3PLs with the market’s most accurate ETA for 100% of their ocean shipments across all lanes worldwide.
With the Dynamic ETA, Shippers can simply log into the FourKites platform and have a dashboard that parses out their shipments into buckets based on their time of arrival. Our machine learning algorithm that powers the ETAs factors numerous data, including inclement weather, congestion, stopped vessels and more, to give you the industry’s most accurate ETAs.
