Day: 28 May 2020

The target of 50% of all bills of lading to be electronic within the next decade has been set by the Digital Container Shipping Association (DCSA) in an announcement made last week. International freight transport insurer TT Club welcomes the commitment by the group of container shipping lines that together operate nearly 70% of the world’s capacity. The initiative is consistent with the increased trend towards digitisation across the industry to improve efficiency and reduce costs. However, the current pressures felt through the supply chain as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic have no doubt spurred the action.

In its role as liability insurer and adviser on risk management throughout the container industry, TT Club is active in encouraging digitisation, including the cumbersome bill of lading processes. Additionally, the mutual has been providing valuable guidance to operators on the unique practical issues that they are experiencing with the physical transfer of bills of lading and other documentation due to lockdowns, government restrictions and other COVID-19 related disruptions. The Club has compiled a dedicated COVID-19 webpage¹ to communicate such advice, including numerous briefings, FAQs and links to further regulatory information.

Peregrine Storrs-Fox, TT Club’s Risk Management Director comments, “As early as the late 1990s TT Club recognised the substantial benefits that would accrue to the entire international unitised supply chain, as well as liner shipping businesses, through the adoption of electronic documentation, taking its part in the foundation of bolero.net². This initiative also understood that the bill of lading is but one component in much broader trade practices, including buyers and sellers and, critically, banks. As a result bolero.net has developed a significant array of trade offerings that wrap around the fundamental characteristics that are fulfilled legally in the traditional bill of lading.”

TT Club is concerned that there continues to be such significant reliance on paper-based processes, whether certification, checks, or the range of contractual documents in international trade. The opportunity for seismic efficiencies and broader benefits were extensively explored in TT Club’s joint work with McKinsey & Co, ‘Brave new world? – Container transport in 2043’³ which adamantly concluded that the future for the container shipping industry was digital.

Some advances towards true digitisation have been made over the last two decades, including the formation of DCSA itself, with a mission to bring efficiencies through standardised messaging amongst shipping lines. More pertinent to the electronic bill of lading (ebsl) itself, the last few years have seen a proliferation of options being brought to market, mostly embracing to greater or lesser extent the much-vaunted distributed ledger technologies, or Blockchain. It is also clear that TradeLens, the consortium founded by Maersk and IBM, also has ebsl in sight.

Storrs-Fox concludes, “The current pandemic has inevitably advanced the digital cause. It is entirely reasonable for DCSA to grasp this particular nettle, taking full advantage of the lessons learned over the last two decades. Indeed, the plethora of physical documentation and ‘chops’ for every international transport involving sea carriage remain fertile ground for further efficiencies that may yet dwarf those immediately in view.”

¹https://www.ttclub.com/news-events/coronavirus-guidance/
²https://www.bolero.net/
³https://www.ttclub.com/news-events/brave-new-world/

GEFCO’s Air & Sea business has announced new leadership and a reorganization to boost customer-centricity and accelerate business in three key sectors: industry, automotive and life science/healthcare.

Since February, Paul-Henri Fréret (above), Executive Vice President has been leading GEFCO’s Air & Sea division. With broad experience at GEFCO, he has managed all areas of the business in Asia and Latin America in addition to Groupe PSA operations at Group headquarters. He has also held global corporate management functions at GEFCO in warehouse logistics and road transport.

In May, Cyril Lefebvre was promoted to Global Sales and Marketing Director for the Air & Sea division, from Managing Director of French operations. With in-depth experience in Air & Sea operations at GEFCO and other Freight Forwarding companies, he will shape and drive the division’s commercial and marketing strategy worldwide.

Air & Sea has also reinforced its organization to drive business in three key sectors: industry, automotive and life sciences/healthcare. Serge Kisselevsky is now Industry Market Line Manager, while Adrian Draghici is Market Line Manager for Automotive. Karin Van-Den Brekel will continue to lead the Life Science and Healthcare business, a role she has occupied since 2019. These areas will be strongly supported by a new trade lane manager, Amer Benouda and tender centre manager, Romain Bérard.

Interroll and Teknokom, an innovative system integrator for complete warehouse automation solutions, have installed an automated order picking system for Cookplus in Istanbul, Turkey. Essential elements of the new material handling solution are the RollerDrive EC 5000, MultiControl, and the Modular Conveyor Platform (MCP) from Interroll. The system combines advanced features such as travel control, automatic invoice printing, dynamic volume measurement, with cargo label applications and real-time monitoring.

The order picking automation system which was delivered and installed by Teknokom is a key part of Cookplus’s modern, 6,000-square-metre distribution centre of Cookplus in Hadimköy near Istanbul which serves customers all over the country. Cookplus is the e-commerce brand of Karaca Group, a leader in the tableware, kitchen and home textile market, operating with 2,700 dealers and shops in 27 countries. The zero-pressure-accumulation conveyors used for this material flow solution have a length of more than 220 metres interconnecting a variety of picking stations with the packaging and shipping areas on two floors of the facility. The efficient and extremely energy-saving conveying of totes and parcels uses about 190 RollerDrive EC 5000 units being controlled by 60 Interroll MultiControls cards connected to a programmable logic controller (PLC) and a warehouse management system.

“With our new solution we dramatically increased the performance and capacity of our distribution and fulfilment centre by avoiding a variety of complex manual internal processes. Just as important to us as increasing our efficiency was further improving customer satisfaction through very fast and reliable deliveries,” says Ertugrul Celebi, Chief Operating Officer, Logistics & Supply Chain, at Karaca A.S.

The advanced conveyor system is entirely managed by software developed by Teknokom, a long-standing member of the Rolling On Interroll program, Interroll’s international partner network. The software applications use the data gathered by Interroll’s MultiControl cards for controlling and monitoring purposes. One example is an intelligent travel control feature which allows bypassing picking stations or a complete floor if no action from operators is needed. Moreover, at the end of the picking operation, before packaging, a printer automatically equips every order with the respective invoice. Upon entering the shipping area, a label applicator automatically pastes to each order a barcode label for the forwarding agent; this label contains all of the necessary information, including the order destination, volume information and a list of content.

“To fulfill the demanding needs of our customer, we used our long-standing cooperation with Interroll and smoothly integrated different state-of-the-art technologies in this automated material flow system. The complete project was very carefully and holistically executed, from planning and installation up to maintenance and support. For example, our customer is now able to monitor the operation of his system in real time via an online application—whenever and wherever he wants,” declares Mustafa Hisim, Deputy General Manager at Teknokom A.S.

Teknokom’s software application allows for monitoring the whole material flow process for maintenance and support purposes via a user-friendly interface which offers controlling as well as reporting features. For example, the locations of the totes, the actual status of the orders, and the picked items in a single tote can be seen for both floors. Moreover, operation managers can receive live as well as time-frame-based reports about order fulfillment capacity, bottlenecks in the picking stations, error reports, and detailed performance information.

EPG | CnB (Contract and Billing) is the comprehensive solution for digital contract and billing management for all logistics services. From contract creation through comprehensive records of performance to contract assignment and automatic invoicing, this tool provides powerful modules for all work and process steps. The main advantages: EPG | CnB ensures that all services under the agreed contracts are billed quickly and in full at the correct price. EPG | CnB also documents and reliably bills for any services provided beyond the original contract. Invoice verification by the customer is then carried out in a time-efficient manner in the customer web portal. Expensive adjustments of invoices and cancellations are therefore a thing of the past. With the verification process significantly shortened, invoices are paid faster.

Logistics service providers – whether in warehouse logistics, transport management, air freight or rail transport – provide a variety of services to their customers on a daily basis. This cooperation is based on contracts containing the services specifically agreed, including billing conditions – across a thick jungle of information and individual agreements. Errors can creep in quickly. Often, however, services that go beyond the contractual agreements are not documented at all – and, as a result, not billed after the fact. This results in complex invoice corrections and not infrequently in high monetary losses on the part of the logistics service providers.

Smart contract management: digital contracting
EPG | CnB digitizes and organizes management of contracts, including the agreed conditions and catalogues of services. This also includes creating specific customer and supplier contracts to the required degree of detail. EPG | CnB has an integrated contract template manager. Users can easily create their own custom templates for contract creation. Additional activities can also be documented quickly and securely and saved as an annex to the main contract The software automatically inserts the information in the correct place in the document based on the customer agreements. EPG | CnB also supports version management including tracking changes and it provides an internal approval process. The contract is then sent in advance to a defined group of recipients for verification via e-mail link before it is sent on to the customer. This minimizes the risk of errors from the outset.

Cross-supply chain record of performance and automated invoicing
EPG | CnB records all services performed along the supply chain for all areas. CnB records warehouse activities, such as goods incoming, stock transfers and picking, as well as services related to road, rail, sea and air, such as container unloading or toll charges. These are transmitted to the software or, alternatively, simply recorded directly on site using the mobile app. EPG | CnB then takes over the fully automated recognition and assignment of the service to the correct contractual conditions. This is based on a commercial rulebook, including price index clauses for automatic price adjustments and foreign currency management. The invoice is then generated digitally and automatically. The EPG | CnB system also supports automated billing runs. Generated invoice documents can be printed and automatically sent to the customer by email. The customer can then easily verify the invoice on the web portal, significantly reducing the number of customer complaints and queries and providing greater transparency throughout the process. Using EPG | CnB, customers reduce the complexity of their ERP system, as complex and expensive changes to processes are no longer necessary.

Konecranes and Fluidmesh Networks announce that they have joined forces and successfully carried out proof-of-concept testing of fully wireless communication for the Konecranes Automated RTG system. This breakthrough allows container terminal operators to roll out remote control and automation to RTGs in the container yard without running fibre or cable spools, with substantial savings in cost and time.

Port and container terminal operators have been embracing automation to increase productivity and give better working conditions to their employees. Many of the newest and largest container terminals have been adopting some level of automation and support for remote operations: from ship-to-shore cranes, to horizontal transport, to automated stacking cranes. However, this has not been the case for RTGs, which are widely used in container terminals around the world. Much of the world’s RTG fleet is diesel-powered, and there have been limited options for automating RTGs given the fact that running cables to them is costly and often unpractical. Konecranes and Fluidmesh have been working closely to solve the connectivity challenge, creating a new opportunity for container terminal operators.

The automation solution for RTGs comes as part of the Konecranes ARTG 2.0 system update, which was in development for over two years with thousands of hours of field testing. Fluidmesh MPLS-based wireless technology has been used to guarantee low latency and high throughput to the RTGs for control and live-video data. The system has been designed to operate on licensed as well as unlicensed frequencies around the world, providing north of 99.95% uptime in real working conditions.

“We are thrilled to have been given the opportunity to work with a leader like Konecranes and contribute to a system that helps container terminal operators around the world to embrace automation and drive the productivity of their RTGs,” comments Cosimo Malesci, Fluidmesh Co-Founder and EVP Sales and Marketing. “Our wireless MPLS-based technology has been proven in many vehicle automation systems around the world where 802.11 WiFi or LTE haven’t been able to deliver. Our focus on seamless roaming, extremely low latency and high throughput wireless networks to drive productivity, safety, and security continues to pay off. We are truly honored to have been able to deliver such performance to the container terminal space.”

This cooperation with Fluidmesh is part of Konecranes’ path to port automation, where container terminals improve productivity and safety in manageable steps. From smart features up to full automation, the path can include supervised operation and remote operation to smoothly introduce the power of automation. The path to port automation applies to all container handling equipment brands. Full automation can be the final goal but it doesn’t have to be. Flexibility is the key, says the company.