For anyone who buys and trades globally, it is not enough just to know when a container ship has left the port. Predicting the arrival time as accurately as possible and tracking the shipment in real time is an unbeatable competitive advantage for shippers," emphasizes Christian Trappe, Sales & Business Development Lead at Setlog. The IT company's first customer to use Shippeo's solution is the household goods specialist Wenko from Hilden near Düsseldorf. On a day-to-day basis, companies can easily obtain full transparency about the transport status of their shipment.

There are several reasons for this: Shippeo's tool can be fully integrated into the OSCA SCM solution in just a few steps via an interface (API); there is no media discontinuity. This gives users access to 90 percent of all sea freight vessels. Users benefit from real-time container tracking down to SKU level. Shippers remain digitally independent, which means they can continue to work with their freight forwarders, contract logistics providers and other partners and do not have to replace their service providers. This creates an innovative early warning system that allows better control of the inflow to the warehouse. Delays are not only avoided, but stock and demand are also balanced and optimized.

150,000 logistics service providers connected

According to Christian Trappe, the choice of a partner in the field of real-time transport tracking was made for several reasons. Firstly, Shippeo has the widest reach in this area with access to more than 150,000 logistics service providers and at the same time more than 1,000 TMS and telematics systems are connected to the system. Secondly, the platform is more mature than any other on the market and delivers the highest ETA accuracy. According to Trappe, Shippeo promises 90 percent accuracy in delay forecasts up to twelve hours before delivery in the road sector.

In order to continuously improve its forecasts, the French company not only works on improving data quality, but also relies on modern technologies such as machine learning. In May last year, Shippeo published figures on the improvement in accuracy: "In a window of up to 48 hours before a planned delivery, the increase was an impressive 32%. This was an exciting moment for us and our customers, especially as we have already heard from several customers how impressed they are with our Estimated Time of Arrival forecasts. This includes Renault, one of the largest car manufacturers in the world," says Anand Medepalli, Chief Product Officer at Shippeo.

For Christian Trappe, the cooperation with Shippeo is an important milestone in establishing an inbound supply chain with maximum transparency and real-time visibility in companies: "Our SCM solution OSCA provides our customers with SKU transparency from the selection of the supplier to the control of the ordering process to the receipt of the goods in the distribution center."

This article appeared in issue 4/23