INTTRA’s roadmap forward

INTTRAÆs roadmap forward       Since its founding in November 2000, INTTRA's role in the containerized ocean shipping business has been a hot topic of discussion. Many have speculated about the company's prospects for success and wondered where it is headed.
      Today, the Parsippany N.J.-based company employs more than 250 people on four continents and connects to 30 ocean carriers representing about 80 percent of the world's container shipping capacity.
      'Roughly 10 percent of global ocean container trade is initiated on the INTTRA platform,' said Harry Sangree, senior vice president of business development and corporate strategy. He estimates revenue from these transactions accounts for roughly 85 percent of INTTRA's business.
      In March, INTTRA announced that five of its major carrier owners, including Maersk Line, Mediterranean Shipping Co. and CMA-CGM, pledged $100 million in contracts to INTTRA over the next three years. At the same time the company announced changes to its pricing model that will for the first time allow carriers to buy INTTRA transactional and professional services separately. A month later the company entered an agreement to deploy a financial settlement application with Deutsche Bank in the fourth quarter of 2009.
      To many industry analysts and observers this series of announcements may give the impression the company is moving away from its charter to provide ocean carriers a centralized booking platform and transforming itself into an applications provider for shippers and freight forwarders as other booking portals have done during this decade.
      American Shipper recently sat down with Sangree to shed some light on INTTRA's position in the market, the drivers behind these recent announcements, and the company's roadmap moving forward.
      'There has been no change in ownership,' Sangree said in reference to the financial event that took place in the spring. 'This cash flow has allowed us to continue to invest in enhancing our mainstay product and develop a front-end and back-end expansion.
      'Our carriers see the cost savings they're getting from INTTRA today and are asking where else they can work with us to create savings,' he said. 'The natural extension is to look at business processes before and after the shipment initiation.'
      Speaking to INTTRA's financial position in the bigger picture, Sangree called the company 'operationally profitable,' repeating words that INTTRA's Chief Executive Officer Ken Bloom used in an American Shipper interview several years ago.

Focus On Carriers. Sangree said INTTRA remains committed to servicing the ocean carrier industry. 'It's all about lowering costs,' he said. 'Now we're expanding the current footprint beyond the portal to include customer acquisition on the front end and financial settlement on the back end.
      'We service 10 percent of the market for our mainstay product. There's still 90 percent left which is a huge growth opportunity' Sangree added.
      In the July 2008 American Shipper (pages 68-86), MergeGlobal valued the ocean carrier industry at more than $200 billion per year globally. 'Focus, industry knowledge and ecommerce expertise allows us to serve this market exceptionally well,' Sangree said.
      INTTRA refers to its 10-year-old mainstay business as shipment initiation and management. The functionalities that this activity includes are:
      ' Booking request.
      ' Confirmation.
      ' Shipping order submission.
      ' Shipping instruction submission.
      ' Bill of lading review.
      ' Visibility and tracking.
      'We are always investing in this segment of our platform to make the data stream richer and faster,' Sangree said. Later this year and early 2010, the company will release an upgraded version of INTTRA-Act, its Web-based tool, which takes advantage of new technologies leveraged in OceanSchedules.com. 'This new version will increase the company's ability to take on more transactions and increase the scope of our offering,' Sangree said.

Customer Acquisition. In January 2007, INTTRA unveiled its OceanSchedules.com Web site, which allows all container carriers ' customer or not ' to post sailing schedules, and anyone to query the database at no charge. Logistics service providers from all segments can advertise next to search results relevant to the services they are pitching, much like Google has made keyword advertising famous on its search engine. On the surface this appears to be a relatively simple and logical extension of INTTRA's core business, but to the company it's far more strategic.
      'We have more than 8 million schedules in our database,' Sangree said. 'We are seeing active buyers using the Web site and we think we can offer additional value to meet the needs of this community and their carriers. OceanSchedules.com is already offering a one-to-one marketing opportunity that did not exist in this market.'
      The OceanSchedules.com functionality encompasses much of INTTRA's front-end enhancements, also called 'customer acquisition' by the company. This includes sales lead generation, carrier branding, pricing, and route/schedule selection. For carriers that participate in INTTRA, OceanSchedules.com allows them to receive bookings from users who search and select services, which ties this activity directly into INTTRA's booking platform.
      'We recently reached 25,000 schedule search queries per week on the Web site and we see a tremendous opportunity to increase traffic further,' Sangree said.

Freight Settlement. More recently INTTRA made an interesting announcement with Deutsche Bank, a global investment bank based in Germany. The two groups will jointly introduce a freight settlement application in the fourth quarter with the goal of cutting transaction processing costs by half. The companies estimate that 150 million invoices are created each year with an average cost of $20 to $60 per invoice, which makes this a considerable opportunity for technology to wring costs out of the system.
      'INTTRA eInvoice will allow carriers and their customers to save by eliminating costly errors, streamlining dispute resolution and improve productivity in the collections process,' Sangree said.
      The roadmap INTTRA provided to American Shipper claims the financial settlement, or back-end expansion, portion of the company's footprint will provide invoice presentation, dispute management and freight payment functionality.