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Unblanking and blanking

Blanking voyages has turned into unblanking. Ocean carriers try to match supply with demand on a precise basis, to cut losses.

That is a proven technique in industries where you can also vary inventory. But voyages are time-sensitive, and result in lead time losses for shippers. And with large ships, there are a lot more of them.

Even in transportation we see it– I believe it is a similar philosphy to Precision Controlled Railroading made popular by Hunter Harrison at CN and later CSX. But the effect in railroading has been to drive business to trucks, except for large shippers. And we will see the same in ocean container carriage.

It’s COVID-19 time, and we can think about what would happen in public transportation, say a train system, adopted ‘blanked sailings’. You go to the station for the 8:42 and find that because of insufficient demand the train was not running and you’d be late for your work as a cleaner at a hospital. You’d be MAD. You would also think about how else to get there, perhaps a bicycle (probably there is no air!). And if this happened a lot, you might quit using the rail altogether.

Soon Ocean container carriers will serve only a few large customers who can stand the inventory fluctuations of blanked sailings. That is actually what has happened in railroading as well. Where can the small customer get a break?

Enter the forwarders. By doing the ocean carriers’ job, by consolidating shippers, they can buy blocks of movement, and become the large customers for the ocean carriers. but now there will be mismatches at each step. It is a classic bullwhip effect. forwarders over-order to be sure they get their share, then can’t fill their space. Carriers will blank sailings, inconveniencing everyone. And we see supply-denamd variation with huge amplitude, making it impossible to control.

Welcome to transportation life in the 21st century.

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 via Growing demand for space pushes carriers to reinstate blanked voyages – The Loadstar

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 via But transatlantic is ‘still suffering’, and voiding voyages goes on – The Loadstar

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Posted on May 20, 2020 by in Uncategorized

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Blockchain not yet for supply chains

Gartner says 80% of blockchain supply chain developments won’t get out of design and development for several years.  So many of them are just recycling financial blockchain ideas into supply chain space without understanding the issues.  A case of a solution chasing a problem, the bugaboo of ITY initiatives forever.

I’d like to get my hands on this report from Gartner.  It should be interesting.

The Gartner source below says 90%!!! I like that number better as an estimate.

Here’s a quote from the latter press release from Gartner:

“The budding nature of blockchain makes it almost impossible for organizations to identify and target specific high-value use cases. Instead, companies are forced to run multiple development pilots using trial and error to find ones that might provide value.  …

Furthermore, current creations offered by solution providers are complicated hybrids of conventional blockchain technologies.”

Exactly.

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 via Blockchain may be the way ahead for supply chains – but not yet – The Loadstar

Another source: https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2019-05-07-gartner-predicts-90–of-blockchain-based-supply-chain

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Posted on February 13, 2020 by in Advanced Computing, Logistics, Production Operations, Strategy, Supply Chains, Uncategorized

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DCSA unveils new era of smarter supply chains with track & trace standards

The Digital Container Shipping Association has unveiled its new T&T standard for tracking containers while en route between shipper and consignee.  They are quite detailed and have been planned using some of the latest design thinking techniques, including the definition of personas who might use the system one way or another. They’ve prepared some very nice slide shows to describe at a high level what they are doing.

DCSA was launched by MSC, Maersk, Hapag-Lloyd and ONE last April, with CMA CGM, Yang Ming, Evergreen, HMM and Zim joining a month later. This is a fairly quick turnaround for a first standard delivery.

The catch will be how fast people start sticking to them when building equipment and systems. Doing so can be predicted to help sales, via a network effect– since the standards make systems compatible, there’s less hassle making one system relate to another.  A close review should be done of the standards, to see how many choices individual participants are given to make the information specific to their needs.  Such choices tend to produce systems that lose their compatibility if one of the partners changes, and make specific programming necessary when others try to adapt to the system. It’s the anthesis of cooperation.  And these standards are meant to promote cooperation rather than competition.

An example of the issue can be seen with EDI, in which general record structures are defined, but a lot of latitude is given to provide extra information or different information. The result is that EDI needs to be specially programmed for each pair-wise interaction of companies, a problem that has haunted us for 20 years even though
EDI, in general, was a big step forward.

Let’s hope that we all have learned from the past, and can use the standard to really lubricate information flow in supply chains.

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By via New era of smarter supply chains as DCSA track & trace standards are unveiled – The Loadstar

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Posted on January 28, 2020 by in Advanced Computing, Logistics, Production Operations, Shipping, Strategy, Supply Chains, Uncategorized

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