Customers looking for ocean shipping carriers have often had to base their decisions on price alone. Quantifiable market statistics have been severely lacking, giving companies no way to judge which ocean shipping company will best meet their needs. Up until now, prospective customers have had to rely heavily on marketing campaigns and/or price, leaving many quality, smaller budget, ocean carriers out of luck when it came to proving themselves and having a fair chance at new business. An article on the Supply Chain Brain website says that we can soon expect shipping service metrics to become more commoditized.
“We are currently seeing this situation at the verge of changing with a range of new quantitative service measurements being launched into the marketplace. What is particularly interesting to see is the emergence of measurements specifically aimed at a highly detailed level. Some of these measurements include the ability to measure the arrival of individual containers vis-à-vis the original promise the carrier made on the booking confirmation. Such measurements are clearly even more valuable to a shipper than schedule reliability measurements. We have conducted a study across more than 20,000 ports showing that whereas 65 percent of all liner vessels arrive on time, the containers on board those vessels are only delivered timely in 50 percent of the cases. These measurements therefore bring a whole new dimension into the market analysis available to the individual stakeholders in the market.”
As it stands, shippers don’t have many ways of discovering if their ocean carrier is performing above or below the benchmark set by their competitors, because there essentially is no benchmark. The ocean shipping industry, however, is becoming more commoditized as time moves on, making it easier to set standards and quantifiable metrics to measure them by.
Unfortunately, good <a href=”http://www.shiplilly.com/”title=”Ocean Shipping”>ocean shipping</a> service providers often have to cut costs on advertising and prices to be competitive, making it a struggle for them to stand out from the crowd. Moving towards more commodities in the industry is actually making it easier for these companies to set themselves apart, giving them the statistics that they need to compare their service levels against other ocean carriers. Companies that need these higher service levels will have a way of comparing service-driven carriers against each other.
“In the years ahead, we expect to see a continued emergence of more detailed market intelligence statistics. New data mining techniques allow for rapid data access, and better market intelligence support provide for rapid application of the information. We believe this emergence of detailed market intelligence will eventually support carriers focusing on differentiation as it provides the means for quantifying the value of such differentiation.”
About the Author: Nelson R. Cabrera is the Business Development Manager of Lilly & Associates International, a transportation and logistics company specializing in <a href=”http://www.shiplilly.com/”title=”Ocean Freight”>ocean freight</a> and <a href=”http://www.shiplilly.com/”title=”Ocean Shipping”>ocean shipping</a> services. For more information, please visit http://www.shiplilly.com/.
Sources:
http://www.supplychainbrain.com/content/nc/logisticstransportation/ocean-transportation/single-article-page/article/a-new-generation-of-measurements-in-ocean-transportation/