SeaIntel: Schedule reliability better, but still behind 2013

   SeaIntel said schedule integrity by global container carriers “continues to improve, but is still significantly below last year’s performance.”
   The consultant said global schedule reliability increased for the second consecutive month, as the global performance improved by 1.5 percentage points to 73.6 percent in April. Data from INTTRA shows that global container delivery also increased for the second month, from 54.8 percent in March to 56.2 percent in April. It is, however, worth noting that schedule reliability is 8.5 percentage points down compared to April 2013, while container delivery is down 9.6 percentage points.
   SeaIntel said improvement in global schedule reliability is also visible in the major east-west trade lanes, which improved rapidly from March to April, by 10 percent and 11 percent on the Asia-Mediterranean and Transpacific EB lanes, respectively. The Asia-North Europe trade and the Transpacific WB lanes improved by 11 percent and 15 percent, respectively. SeaIntel’s report shows that of the major east-west trade lanes, only Asia-Mediterranean is performing higher than last year.
   Alan Murphy, SeaIntel’s chief operating officer and partner, said, “Even though global schedule reliability is showing a long-needed improvement, shippers should be aware of the performance in their trade lanes, as we see large variations in regional performance, as well as highly variable performance across carriers in different trade lanes”.
   The company’s Sunday Spotlight newsletter said that shippers seeking the best schedule reliability are smart to rely on past performance of carriers.
   As an exercise, the SeaIntel analyzed how shippers obtain the best possible schedule reliability in the Asia-North Europe and Transatlantic Westbound trades. It performed an analysis on a theoretical shipper who wishes to split his containers between three carriers in order to obtain the best possible reliability without “putting all his eggs in one basket”.
   The company used its Global Liner Performance database, which measures more than 10,000 vessel arrivals each month across 32 trade lanes, serviced by 60 different container carriers, to analyze how the best possible schedule reliability could be obtained, based on the last year’s performance by the carriers.
   But it noted that when doing such an analysis there are many different strategies that can be used and that timing becomes quite important.
   “How far back do you look, and for how long into the future will you stick with your choice of carrier?” it asked.
   The company created a theoretical shipper who used five different strategies and found that in the Asia-North Europe trade, all five strategies gave a reliability of roughly 91 percent, compared to market average of 64 percent and a theoretical maximum of 98 percent. In the Transatlantic WB trade, the performance from the five strategies varied from 84 percent to 90 percent, but even the worst of the strategies was still much better than the market average, which over the last year was 66 percent, while the theoretical maximum was 97 percent.
   Murphy said, “Our analysis clearly shows the value of using historical on-time performance as a predictor of future performance. For shippers with time-sensitive cargo, the historical performance can used to ‘beat the market,’ and quite considerably so, with 20-25 percentage points”.