Each day billions of ETA updates are sent by shipowners and carriers to numerous service providers. This includes brokers, freight forwarders, agents, and charterers. For the non-containerized sector of the maritime industry 95% or more of these updates are still communicated via email. For traders, manufacturers, and producers this results in a huge drain on productivity and significantly diminishes supply chain visibility.
The manual workflow for handling ETAs looks something like this:
1: Consolidate the ETAs from a mix of emails, spreadsheets, and PDF Documents
2: Structure the ETAs into a single usable format
3: Validate the ETAs for accuracy against satellite, AIS or 3rd party data
4: Analyze the ETAs for changes that may fall outside of a nominated threshold
5: Share the ETAs with customers, service providers, or internal stakeholders
Supply chain visibility starts with getting your ETA workflows under control. Without this, you will continue to suffer issues around accuracy, latency, and validity.
Voyager Portal: A case study for ETA workflow transformation
A major US Charterer of manufactured products has multiple shipping lanes across the globe. They receive thousands of ETA updates each day via email and in different formats. The operations and logistics teams are then tasked with structuring this data into a single format and checking its validity before sharing within the organization.
Using Voyager Portals workflow modeling application, the company was able to create workflow automation that automatically collects, structure, and validates ETAs from across their global carriers. As data comes in, teams were able to analyze trends in ETA changes overtime across trade lanes, regions, or products.
Voyager became the single source of truth for the company’s ETAs, which could easily be shared via API directly to Salesforce, SAP, or their customer’s applications.
Key results:
- 80% reduction in ETA touchpoints across the value chain by creating a central portal
- ETA related emails forecasted dropped immediately and are forecasted to drop by 80-90% in total within the first 12 months
- The end receivers of the products receive their ETA updates up to 10x faster
- Supply chain and planning teams are able to analyze years of historical ETA data to feed machine learning, optimization, or forecasting algorithms
To learn how Voyager can help your maritime operations, schedule a demo today!