MEETING ONLINE DEMAND WITH DIGITAL SOLUTIONS

New technologies, and their impact on customer behaviour, o er both a challenge and an opportunity for the shipping sector, according to interviewees for this research.

One lasting impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been a generational surge in e-commerce, which has increased the volume of consumer goods in transit via containers. In addition, e-commerce is an extremely time-sensitive sector, so shipping companies are being pressed to accelerate delivery times to remain competitive.

The industry has adjusted, with shippers, retailers and logistics companies adapting their operations and increasing investment in adjacent industries such as final-mile delivery to meet the shift in demand. In the long-term, digitalisation and deployment of machine learning will likely be essential to manage this enhanced pace.

For example, machine learning likely o ers the most e ective tool for managing the structural imbalance of global transport of containerised goods. At present, empty containers make up a significant proportion of container transports – up to 40 percent in over-land and 20 percent of marine transports. Matching regional supply and demand for empty containers and making accurate forecasts of container availability would enable companies to make faster, more e ective relocation decisions and reduce transport costs of empty equipment.

Machine learning and probabilistic techniques o er a path to forecast future availability of empty containers and could contribute to solving the connectivity gap. However, in addition to the costs of implementing these new systems, ensuring equal access to the data required to power machine learning solutions remains a challenge.

A Europe-based port operator explains: “It’s about making sure all the stakeholders that are involved in import and export flows have timely, accurate and complete data. If you inject more data into the process, you can increase your e ciency and throughput without the need of developing additional capacity. The problem is trust… nobody is really incentivised to go after the advantage of improved data sharing. However, once you have a ‘burning platform’ — a capacity or e ciency crisis—that is when you start to see encouraging feedback (although slower than you would expect) to start sharing information.”

This highlights the issue of scale. To deploy these advanced technologies would require significant resources for development and implementation. For these solutions to be e ective, they would need to connect with data from a full range of ports and shipping lines to have a truly global perspective. The risk exists of creating a two-tier system, where only the largest companies have access to the necessary information.