INTTRA releases new ocean freight support tools

The ocean freight booking portal will use forwarders’ and shippers’ historical carrier performance and booking response data to underlie dashboards intended to inform future procurement decisions.    The ocean shipping electronic marketplace INTTRA on Wednesday released a new set of dashboard products aimed at informing the shipment plans of freight forwarders and shippers.
   The new tools are part of a new platform called INTTRA Marketplace Decision Support, with the initial release to include dashboards that help clarify shipment reliability and booking response levels.
   The shipment reliability dashboard is based on a forwarder’s or shipper’s own historical data, collected by INTTRA, and are intended to help ocean freight buyers make plans on future carrier and trade lane usage by comparing estimated versus actual arrival, departure and total transit times.
   “It predicts shipment reliability by trade lane based on historical performance,” said INTTRA Marketplace President Inna Kuznetsova. “Past behavior is best indication of future behavior. The way a freight forwarder would use it is they can see that for this particular trade lane, for this carrier, what has been my historical difference (between estimated and actual performance by its carriers). It helps them determine the risk of meeting cutoff dates, and plan and execute contingency plans. If you have risky trade lanes or if certain carriers present more risk than others, it allows you to make contingencies.”
   The booking response dashboard provides is designed to help ocean freight buyers gauge average time to get a booking confirmed for different shipment options based on historical data.
   The information from both dashboards is intended to be used to inform discussions with external partners, like carriers or forwarders, and also to integrate with existing systems. Kuznetsova said she envisioned the tools being used on a monthly or quarterly basis, and also stressed they were designed to be intuitive and affordable.
   The ease of use and affordability are key in the context of forwarders growing or acquiring companies and wrestling with IT investment decisions to scale appropriately. Often, a forwarder that acquires a company also acquires its legacy systems and the onus is then to find technology that easily integrates across multiple, and sometimes outdated, systems.
   A former forwarding executive herself, Kuznetsova said the tools provide the data points that those companies look to when making shipment plans.
   Nearly a quarter of global ocean freight volume passes through the INTTRA portal, which is predominantly used to make ocean bookings with carriers and to provide shipping instructions with carriers. The company sits on a vast repository of data from those transactions, and is layering analytics on that data to help forwarders and shippers better understand their procurement decisions.
   Kuznetsova said INTTRA will add further dashboards to the Decision Support suite in the coming months. She said the initial two dashboards have been beta tested since spring by a group of forwarder customers.
   “We’re confident these products will be useful,” she said. “These will enable forwarders to help their customers with inventory planning. These things have a positive financial impact.”