INTTRA, which is used to initiate more than 350,000 container orders per week, estimates NVOs handle 34 percent of full containerload shipments and 74 percent of less-than-containerload shipments, a total of about 50 million TEUs of cargo.
The actual number of NVOs is difficult to estimate; INTTRA said its research gives a range of 10,000 to 30,000 globally. The middlemen, which buy lift from container shipping companies and then resell to shippers, can be big or small. But smaller shippers NVOs consolidate smaller lots into containers, offering a shipping service analogous to less-than-truckload shipping.
While 81 of the top 100 NVOs already use INTTRA’s electronic systems like other shippers to exchange information with container liner companies, now NVOs will also be able to do business with their customers on the network.
“NVOs will have really a unique position in the network. They’ll be able to participate as both a sender of data or a shipper, and as a carrier as a receiver of data,” said Robert Haney, director of NVO product management at INTTRA. “It really completes the picture if you think about the supply chain breaking down into shippers and the NVOs and then the steamship lines — those are the three big pieces and this gives us an opportunity to really make it more valuable to all three.”
Shippers, he said, would benefit from a single point of entry through which they can initiate and manage both full container and LCL shipments.
While many NVOs have their own portals through which shippers can do business with them, he said the intermediaries are “only getting a limited amount of traction there, there is only so much they can do to attract business to a one-off site. There is a whole community of shippers who are already using INTTRA and this will make it very convenient for them since they are already using it to go to steamship lines,” Haney said.
ECU Line, an Antwerp-based NVO, has been using INTTRA to receive shipping instructions from their shippers on a pilot basis since earlier this year.
Haney said INTTRA will sign up NVOs globally to do business with shippers.
'We have joined INTTRA to receive transactions electronically and this is an additional tool to serve our customers. Going forward we would like to reach a point where the majority of our shipping transactions are electronic,” said Franky Van Doren, ECU Line's senior vice president of sales and marketing. “We expect the INTTRA network to be our fastest growing electronic documentation channel.”
Haney said shippers would be able to perform all the functions they perform today with vessel operators when they use INTTRA to do business with NVOs, and eventually the company plans to let them post schedules on its Web site. ' Chris Dupin
