ARL e-Schedule platform allows transport companies publish online their own schedules and schedules from carriers they use. The platform offers various ways of building and publishing schedules for transport networks. Let's outline the major features of the platform.

Building schedules

Service points. The first step in building your own schedule is to list the service points in your transport network. These could be cities, pick-up points, any named locations which are known to your clients.

Services. A service combines certain service points for future linking by corridors. There could be one-way services and circular ones.

Rotations. Each service should have at least one rotation defined. Rotation is a sequence of service points visited by transport vehicle. Rotations can follow some time pattern and can be daily, weekly, etc.

Legs. Every leg within a rotation should have its own schedule for arrival, departure and pick-up/availability times.

Corridors. Once all service points are connected and timing is defined it is time to set the actual transport corridors out of all possible combinations we would like to be visible to your clients.

Last step is to publish the schedule on your website by embedding a small HTML code and watch the schedule requests log in the back office of the platform.

Importing schedules

This feature is made for the companies which utilize carriers transport, e.g. forwarding companies. If there is a carrier schedule available in e-Schedule, then it can be reused and published as forwarder's own with maybe different pickup and delivery cut-offs. All service points, rotations, legs and corridors definitions will be imported automatically. The forwarder can always limit the offering from the carrier by deselecting those corridors which he doesn't want to offer. The schedule from the carrier will stay updated automatically. 

Extra features

Pick-up and delivery points. If your company offers door-to-door service then you would need to define all possible areas or points from where you can pick-up the cargo. So you can define all neighbour cities or regions with appropriate transit times and connect them to service points in your schedule. Same goes for the delivery points. All these connected points and areas will be visible in the schedule request form.

Linked points. What if you have a local regular connection from one of your own or imported service points to some neighbour locations? You can define these linked points with their own transit times for import/export flow and let them be visible in the public schedule wizard.

ARL e-Yield Suite - an online solution for all types of transportation companies - now supports multiple currency. That means all subscribers of ARL e-Quote and e-Book can now select not only the main currency they use in their books but also some local currencies their customers are used to.

The list of available currencies contains 48 entries starting with U.A.E. Dirham (AED) and ending with South Africa Rand (ZAR). All cross rates are updated daily.

ARL e-Yield Suite users can set price in any of these currencies for their transport services as well as for other items, such as surcharges and value offerings.

Low cost airlines entered the European airspace in 1991 when Ireland's Ryan Air commenced their operations. Later easyJet followed in 1995 and from 2000 a similar trend started in Asia. Aside from the leaders of the low cost airlines being financially successful in a tight market, they differentiate themselves from traditional airlines by a number of factors:

During a series of articles, we will explore a number of these differences -those facilitated by IT technology- and draw parallels to how the cargo industry is currently operating and may operate in the future.

Whilst considering some physical conditions defining the possible berthing of a container vessel in port, like LOA of vessel, free space between vessels, vessel ETA & ETD, draught and tide, temporary unavailable berthing zones (non-working crane or quay under repair) vessels can be planned for berthing at a container terminal.

Combining these restrictions with knowledge about the physical characteristics of the yard (geometry, dimensions, yard driving rules), the actual location of containers ready for loading and assigned blocks for discharge containers, the assigned vessel berth can be optimized with the result of saved mileage of the yard equipment.

This optimization algorytm belongs to the NP-hard complexity class. This means that there is no exact effective algorithm known. Brute force algorithm, that finds all vessels' permutations (only relative vessel position, no exact coordinates, no traffic optimization) requires about 1018 combinations to be considered for moderately busy terminals with 20 calls per week. Such direct approach may take hours and even days just to find a feasible berthing scenario.

Wikipedia:

NP-hard (nondeterministic polynomial-time hard), in computational complexity theory, is a class of problems informally "at least as hard as the hardest problems in NP." A problem H is NP-hard if and only if there is an NP-complete problem L that is polynomial time Turing-reducible to H, i.e. . In other words, L can be solved in polynomial time by an oracle machine with an oracle for H.

The famous simplex method that successfully solves many real world problems cannot be applied to berthing optimization as it contains non-linear both constraints and target function, due to the yard equipment mileage calculation.

The solution was to build an effective approximation algorithm by incorporating algorithms from graphs theory and an inhouse developed algorithm for solving system of inequalities, that describes parameters of the task. It finds near to optimal solution in seconds:

The proposed algorithm starts with finding a feasible solution by solving a system of inequalities. This system reflects physical limitations such as total berth length, vessel length, minimal allowable distance between vessels, location of unavailable zones, etc. The solver not only places vessels to berth to meet all constraints, but also find vessel position among available positions resulting in minimal yard equipment mileage. The algorithm also uses vessel priority based on total amount of move operations to guarantee that "heavy" vessels get the best positions. Output of this stage is a feasible berthing scenario with reasonably good total mileage.

Next phase operates with graph representation of the berth scenario. It checks if small shift of vessel and all dependent vessels (that do not change order of vessels) give total mileage decrease. If mileage can be decreased by the vessel shift, the algorithm executes accordingly.

Then a set of heuristics is applied to the scenario. These heuristics defines rules of vessel permutations, that cannot break the scenario feasibility, but can result in mileage decrease. This phase completes final scenario tuning.

An important advantage of the approach is that it allows adjusting almost any parameter manually and letting others to be found by the algorithm. Additionally, the structure of the algorithm allows adaption to new business requirements. This results in flexibility in practical applications.

During recent years ARL Consulting have completed several projects incorporating complex mathematical models as an integral part of the solution provided. This is in response to the continously increasing unit counts in shipping and transport, like growing size of vessels, number of transports, number of hub-and-spoke connection opportunities, which makes it harder and harder to identify and evaluate multiple options by human force only.

In a series of shipZine articles three business challenges in the transport industry, which has been successfully resolved by applying scientific approaches, will be explored:

1. selection of optimal container vessel berthing at quay side
2. evaluation of relevant vessel deployment opportunities
3. vessel bunker consumption calculation

Each of the business scenarios provide benefits for the transportation organisation: 

1) selection of optimal container vessel berthing reduce the mileage required by the yard equipment for servicing the vessel; this results in direct fuel savings, time savings for equipment drivers, reduces wear-and-tear and allow for servicing of more vessels with the same amount of equipment and staff. 

2) evaluation of relevant vessel deployment opportunities provides the deployment planners with the ability to consider feasible and relevant network and deployment scenarios, which can be assessed from an operational and commercial perspective, not only saving time with the planners, but highlighting deployment scenarios, with benefical cost and income opportunities, which otherwise would not have been considered due to the complexity of the many opportunities.

3) vessel bunker consumption calculation give the direct benefit of reduced bunkers costs.

brute force - Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing:

<programming> A primitive programming style in which the programmer relies on the computer's processing power instead of using his own intelligence to simplify the problem, often ignoring problems of scale and applying naive methods suited to small problems directly to large ones. The term can also be used in reference to programming style: brute-force programs are written in a heavy-handed, tedious way, full of repetition and devoid of any elegance or useful abstraction

The mathemathical approaches used are all 'intelligent' alternatives to clean brute-force approach and reflect in some form that the computer system act as a human thinking brain -just much faster and more comprehensive.

Many other areas for harvesting benefit by using math force, like container vessel stowage planning, exist in the transport industry.

Airline and shipping line examples:

· airasia.com
· airarabia.com
· easyjet.com
· airberlin.com
· youship.com

Common concerns and issues in the cargo transport industry, when applying an LCC model addressed:

For how long is a quote valid? Freight quotes have instant validity due to the fact that market conditions -which are the assumptions for the current quote- may be changing. The customer is presented with a freight quote and need to confirm his booking right away, if to accept the quote. If the customer doesn't accept the freight quote by booking cargo, price for the same transport may be quoted differently the next time the customer ask, due to changed demand or supply of space.

How can I give space guarantee? You can give space guarantee in return for your customer's cargo guarantee! If the customer doesn't show up with the cargo prior to departure service point closing, you still get paid, as it is the customer's responsibility to bring the cargo on time -or to have the cargo available for warehouse loading, if you offer door-door services. It is only reasonable, that in response to the customer's cargo guarantee, you give space guarantee!

How are exceptions managed? Exceptions are either not supported, or only supported against an extra fee. The extra fee reflects additional effort on the transport provider's side, or additional value created to the customer. Rather than spreading the costs across all cargo, you request an extra fee from the customer who require/benefit from the exception. In the airline industry, exceptions like flexible tickets, meals, priority boarding, extra leg space hardly ever comes for free. Why should no-show, early cargo pick-up or similar exceptions be provided for free in the transport industry?

Can't the customer call me? The clean LLC model entails full self-service, even there are examples of human customer service offerings, like e-mails, online chat or centralized call centers. It is commonly accepted that agreessive pricing comes at the 'price' of less personalized service. You can consider a centralized end-customer service center only supporting a single or a few languages, rather than an 'expensive' distributed and highly localized customer service function.

Can I still work with commercial intermediaries (like forwarders or NVOs)? Yes. Intermediaries are also customers, and all customers are equal. According to the LCC model, no commission or kick-back are offered to intermediaries. All customers have access to the same quotes and are treated the same way, under the same circumstances. This means that the intermediary no longer can charge for access to the transport provider -as the transport provider already offer his transport service to all end-customers directly- and the intermediary will need to charge for other values added to the transport; we all know there are many to offer!

How do I give special customer rates? All customers get same quote under the same conditions. The benefit of large volumes from the customer's perspective are harvested by the customer by a combination of getting the needed space many times -on popular departures- and an agressive price many times -on less popular departures.

How come I can book without login? As all customers anyhow are treated the same way under the same circumstances, and as payment is done as part of the booking process, there is no point in asking for login prior to giving quotes and accepting bookings. Administration of login's are against the principle of simplicity and of self-service, which benefits both the customer and yourself. After a booking is accepted, it is the customer -not you-, who has the responsibility for showing up with the cargo prior to closing -or to have the cargo available for warehouse loading, if you offer door-door services-. Before the booking, all information provided by you can be considered public knowledge.

Can I still offer extra services to my customer? Yes you can, as long as these services can be managed efficiently and can be valued and paid for seperately. Imagine f.ex. that you charge the customer for early availability of cargo at destination -say 4 hours prior to regular availability. This entails additionals value for the customer, as he f.ex. can meet a retail store sales campain. It also entails additional costs on your side, as you have to plan for priority unloading at cargo destination. So it is only reasonable that the customer pays an extra fee for this value-add service.

Will my customers be satisfied even they get less service? Your customers will be satisfied if you deliver what you promise. It is all about setting expectations and meeting expectations. If you set your customers' expectation high and deliver low, you will have a mismatch and dissatisfied customers. If your transport and customer service is crystal clear to the customer up front, and you deliver exactly that, your customers will be satisfied. Let us use an example: Say the cargo availability at destination is Thursday at 16.00 hours. Your customer has specifically de-selected a Euro 50 value-add offer for early availability at 12.30. Will your customer be disappointed that he can't pick up his cargo when his truck arrives at 13.45? You know the answer: He will be perfectly happy as expectations and reality are visible and aligned.

How will my utilization be more balanced by using flexible pricing? Assume you have a Saturday and a Monday departure from the same service point offering a certain transport at the same price. The Monday departure is always full because it is a working day for the customer. The Saturday departure is never full because it is weekend. Imagine that you introduce diffentiated pricing depending on market forecast and actual booking volume/ utilization; Monday is higher, Saturday is lower priced. This will motivate some customers with price sensitive transports, to book on Saturday instead of Monday. You will have even (=balanced) utilization across popular and less popular departures if the price diffentiation is correct. If cargo volumes in the market is definate, you might be able to operate the same service with the same total amount of cargo with less capacity transport vehicles than before; you might be able to free up transport assets to enter new markets without any further investments!

How do I pre-allocate to my VIP customers? You don't. The space guarantee (allocation) is related to the customer accepting the quote at the specific time of giving you his cargo commitment. A long term volume commitment is not sufficient for a space guarantee on popular departures. You can, however, choose to only offer part of your available capacity via the LCC model, and reserve the remaining capacity for contract customers. If your contract customers have downfalls, you can increase the LLC capacity, which will instantly be reflected in the pricing (price will be reduced if capacity is increased/ current utilization decreased).

How can yield be higher, if price is lower? First of all price is only lower under specific market conditions; under certain market conditions -high demand- the price might be higher than the traditional market. If you offer space guarantee (and traditional market doesn't offer space guarantee) a higher price is fine. Secondly the yield is related to a combination of price AND utilization. If you have high utilization, your unit costs are low due to the nature of -high-fixed versus low-variable costs. Thirdly, by operating an LCC model, you are expected to operate efficiently and with a high degree of self-service entailing lower costs at your end, equal to higher yield!

ARL is planning for the release of a three commercial transport packages. The most significant contributor to the benefits created, is the extensive use of mathematical algorithms. Here the objectives and intentions of the solutions are shared –together named the e-Fleet Suite:

• ARL Deployment Planner, for visual deployment of transport assets in a network and automated impact calculations of expected performance and costs
• ARL Network Optimizer, for automated trimming of deployments, and later definition of services and full network
• ARL Fleet Manager, monitoring and tracking of performance and costs comparing with initial calculations, including interaction with internal and external business partners

Current Situation

You already have defined your transport network, organized in services with a published transit time and loading capability, provided by a set of close-to-similar transport vehicles (deep or short sea vessels or ferries, trains, barges of truck) deployed for servicing a sequence of repeatable service points, thereby creating a consistent and predictable corridor (point-to-point) loading capability and transit time. Also you have defined vehicle running costs and service point operational costs, and you have set constraints in the network like channel or lock passage slots, high/low tide quay access time slots, border crossing customs points opening hours etc.

Market & Goal Driven Deployment

Imagine if you rather than deploying the transport vehicles yourself, instead describe the market requirements over time for the individual services, and set and prioritize the goals for your network and for individual services. The goal might be:

• Maximum covering of market demands
• Generation of highest yield
• Maximized use of own transport assets
• Lowest cost
• Minimize use of chartered/ leased transport assets

Based on these criteria the rest is math! Deployment of vehicles to meet the set goals best possible, calculating concrete measures for achieving the prioritized goals, as well as calculating any other metrics, like transit times and costs.

Scenarios in Parallel

Imagine a number of scenarios calculated in parallel each meeting different priorities of goals, giving you the ability to compare the characteristics –costs, transit times, capacities, market coverage- and make a deliberate choice of the best deployment plan for you!

Re-Deployment to Reflect Fluctuating Market

Let us go a little further: Imagine your market demands are fluctuating over time, with a variation in the demand for individual products, for example seasonal refrigerated market demands.

Rather than deploying the same set of vehicles over a longer period of time on the same service, let the optimizer deploy assets dynamically using the hubs in your hub-and-spoke network to minimize costs for service re-deployments, meeting the goals optimally not just as an average yearly consideration, but each and every week.

No more Services

And finally: Do you really need to organize you network in ‘services’? Or is this a concept you have applied for the sake of keeping overview yourself? Your customers are interested in specific corridors for a certain period of time. What if you could organize your network to meet your customers’ demands best possible, with no consideration for internal organization, as all that is done by a software math algorithm, which in parallel can consider many more options, than you can do possibly do manually; which can calculate multiple parameters like costs, transit times, capacities without sweating; which can re-do the calculation dynamically and continuously in order to adjust for operational and commercial realities like delays, weather conditions and ad-hoc market opportunities.

What if your network and deployment would be driven solely by market demands and goals set by you yourself?

This is what math algorithms can do for the transport industry. This is what the ARL guys are doing.

Definition

A shipping line using foreign agents for interacting with individual customers. The line receives copies of bookings/ export manifest by EDI from export agents, and submits EDI message with import manifest to discharge agents. Leave it to individual foreign agents to invoice and collect payments, and receive monthly re-imbursements from foreign agents reflecting freight deducted with agents commission.

Line Benefits

Using e-Business to provide up-to-date sailing schedules available for direct customer and agent self-service, issue tariff rate freight quotes and take bookings will provide the following specific benefits to the shipping line on top of the generic benefits mentioned in introductory article:

• up-to-date sailing schedules reflecting operational adjustments available to all agents and customers instantly
• shipping line direct management of products and corridors offered, rates and corporate surcharges, and distributed local agents management of local fees
• dynamic space re-allocation amongst agents in accordance with actual bookings, securing higher utilization and higher yield
• close monitoring of actual customer activities within agents area
• principal direct management of release of acceptance of alternative products/ cargo (40 instead of 2x20, dry instead of reefer) triggered by (lack of) actual bookings of primary/ preferred cargo
• re-structuring of agents agreement reflecting that major chunk of agents work now done as self-service online transaction (customer schedule enquiry, tariff rate freight quotes, bookings)

Picture: some top-tier shipping lines with own agencies already provide direct -or indirect, via portals- e-business support for the export shipping process with the exception of freight quote issuing, which is not common practice to support with e-business. Principals with foreign agents use e-business less frequently.

Issues & Challenges

Some of the issues that shipping line principals will face when offering e-Business:

Optional or mandatory for agents to use: The line can dictate that all bookings must be entered directly by customer in corporate e-Business website. Alternatively, if some agents are allowed to do freight quotes and take bookings via phone, fax, email or direct customer visits, the agent needs to enter the booking in the e-Business platform on behalf of their customer, as the logging of all bookings in the e-Business platform is a must in order for the e-Business platform to manage utilization and allocation. 

Agent back-office integration: The information flow is reversed. If the foreign agent is using an in-house financial system for keeping track of revenue to be invoiced and collected, and automatically providing book keeping input, the foreign agent needs to receive the financial part of booking data from the e-Business platform. This can be done by electronic messaging (EDI/ebXML) either every time a booking is made, or as a batch transfer after the bookings for a departure is closed.

Principal Integration: The principal may at any time transfer booking data from the e-Business platform to an in-house system. This can be done by electronic messaging (EDI/ebXML) either every time a booking is made, or as a batch transfer after the bookings for a departure is closed. Alternatively the shipping line can use the e-Business platform as the sole commercial system, allowing sharing of data with relevant load/ discharge agents.

Agent allocation versus first-come-first-served: An e-Business platform keeping online bookings for all load ports gives the principal the choice to continue with load port based (agent) allocations, or to accept bookings basis first-come-first-served. The later will secure a higher utilization. Maintaining load port based allocation secure stability for the agents, and the e-Business platform may still support the liner principal in adjusting agent allocations more dynamically.

Principals, who would like to learn more, please check out arl-shipping.com/eb.  In upcoming shipZine articles we will elaborate on how IT-driven market pricing can be used to increase utilization and yield. Principals, who can't wait for this, can read more on arl-shipping.com/ey/.

Definition

An independent shipping line agent represents one or several principals, using in-house IT system for invoicing, receiving payment, keeping track of outstanding freight payments, and possibly also using one or several principal IT systems for submitting manifest data and for import cargo.

The independent agent uses e-Business to provide self-service sailing schedules, issue freight quotes and take bookings. 

Independent Liner Agent Benefits

The e-business platform will provide the following specific benefits to an independent liner agent on top of the generic benefits mentioned in the introductory article:

• offer modern e-Business facilities to customers irrespectively of whether the principal is ready for e-business or not;
• branding of own agency organization towards customers;
• save the front office staff from trial tasks like informing customers about latest sailing schedules eta/etd's and transit times, giving rate sheet freight quotes, taking bookings, keeping track of allocation per departure;
• staff may focus on value-adding services, rather than simple 'transaction work';
• offer a consistently looking transport service provided by agency across multiple principals;
• co-offer principal services and local value-add transport offerings to market.

Picture: it is not common practice that independent agents, or even global agency organizations, offer self-branded e-business solutions support export shipping processes, despite that a large part of the benefits provided by e-business are harvested in the front office.

Issues and Challenges

Some of the issues that liner agents will face when offering e-Business:

Allocation & cross bookings. The liner agent has a firm allocation from principal for export cargo and can use an e-Business platform to manage this allocation (to keep track of when a departure is fully booked). Some of the bookings may be received from other agents doing cross bookings - such bookings might be received by e-mail or via other channels, and in order for the e-Business platform to keep track of the number of free slots still available, the liner agent needs to key-in the booking himself in the e-Business platform, or ask their agents colleagues to use the e-Business platform directly. Cross bookings is done by liner agent's local customers for other export areas needs to be handled outside the e-Business platform.

Agent back-office integration. If the liner agent uses an in-house financial system for keeping track of revenue to be invoiced and collected, and automatically providing book keeping input, the liner agent needs to transfer the financial part of booking data from the e-Business platform to the financial package. This can be done by electronic messaging (EDI/ebXML) either every time a booking is made, or as a batch transfer after the booking for a departure is closed.

Principal back-office integration. The principals may insist on booking data to be updated in their in-house system either instantly when the booking is received in order to be able to adjust the agency allocation up or down when booking closure is coming up, or as a load list batch update after booking closure. This can be done by electronic messaging (EDI/ebXML) either every time a booking is made, or as a batch transfer after the bookings for a departure is closed (manifest/ loading list).

Freight quote, bookings with freight agreement. If a rate agreement exists with a customer, the e-Business engine's freight quote capability offering tariff rates will not add value, and instead the e-Business engine is used to take bookings on concrete sailings for such customers. The e-business engine simplifies the freight quote process and supports that many self-service freight quotes are issued for customers without rate agreements.

Space guarantee. If part of a customer agreement entails space guarantee, the customer must pre-book on the required departures well in advance, or the agent must keep part of the allocation reserved for space guaranteed customers and only release the last allocation if case of space guaranteed customers' downfall.

Independent liner agents, who would like to learn more, please check out arl-shipping.com/eb