This fireside chat recap is from Day 1 of FreightWaves’ Future of Supply Chain live event in Rogers, Arkansas. For more information and content from the event, click here.
FIRESIDE CHAT TOPIC: Navigating maritime freight disruptions by taking visibility beyond the ports
DETAILS: Port congestion has been one of the biggest topics in freight over the past few years. And for good reason — at one point in November, there were nearly 60,000 long-dwelling containers at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach alone. But sometimes, the ports don’t tell the whole story. Today, shippers need comprehensive visibility that extends beyond the terminal, and they need to be able to add context to that data.
SPEAKER: Tyler Hughes, CTO and founder, Vizion
BIO: Hughes is the founder and CTO of Vizion, where he also serves as the engineering manager and technical lead for full-stack and front-end solutions. Hughes is obsessed with servant leadership and building impactful products for web, mobile and desktop. He is passionate about designing and building the application programming interfaces that power the applications he builds. Before moving into digital logistics with Vizion, Hughes was senior software engineer for Netflix and served as engineering manager at ClearMetal.
KEY QUOTES FROM TYLER HUGHES:
“Early on, a lot of the focus was mainly on ‘What is the overall port congestion?’ and ‘Why are all these boats bunched up outside the ports?’ … That’s started to alleviate a bit, and I think what we started to realize as we look at the supply chain as a whole is that it’s built up over a series of ebbs and flows. There’s a number of components that are at play here … and they’re all dependent on each other to operate smoothly.”
“We’re seeing a drop in vessel dwell times. We’re seeing a drop in vessel wait times. There are fewer vessels waiting to get into port, there are fewer vessels waiting at berth. … It looks like less congestion. But at the end of the day, we’re seeing the same amount of congestion or more based on the discharges, based on the containers’ dwell times that we’re able to measure, based on the length of time it takes for those gate ins to come back for the empty boxes.”
“We’re really going back to the intelligence part of data intelligence. So the next step is taking that data, taking that visibility that you have, and rolling that up into insights, rolling it up at the aggregate level and understanding, ‘How are my shipments behaving? Are my shipments actually performing the way that I expect them to?’”
