Nowadays, for the logistics’ and maritime industry is way too evident the power underlying data sharing and the comprehensive innovative opportunities that could be built upon it. Past efforts, i.e. TradeLens, even though fall to achieve platform’s true objective, leaving aside technological-driven purpose and data quality governance, set the pathway towards an unprecedent collaborative scheme and an untapped business potential regarding supply chains’ performance. Nevertheless, the post-pandemic scenario driven by greater resilience need of the sector, the urgency to deal with climate change pressures and emissions awareness and reductions, and even the more often customer demand for greater visibility, depict the drivers under a major transformational change that needs to be unfolded again.
Therefore, an innovative approach is introduced, followed by the “Control Tower concept”, under the name of the “Virtual Watch Tower (VWT)” and the interconnected networks that could emerge from supply chain communities links, the “Internet VWT”. This value creation-oriented platform, given by efficiency, reliability and sustainability, relies in a cargo owner-driven and terminal-centric approach to establish a federated impartial entity, a system-of-systems solution opened to co-creation by its community members. Where collaborative and structured data sharing enables end-to-end situational awareness, AI-powered data analysis, and digitally empowered collaboration; in order to predict and manage disruptions, enhance decision-making and generating actionable knowledge.
Data sharing framework is established, cybersecurity measure adopted, obstacles identified, incentives considered and logistics’ communities invited to participate.
“Data sharing improves operational efficiency by e.g., responding to disruptions more effectively and timely. It also facilitates just-in-time arrival for ports and services by optimising ETA accuracy and readiness for services.”
The main inputs and contributions are:
- Data sharing is hampered by policy and legal barriers, contractual complexities, lack of global standards, a clear objective underneath and information arbitrage, where different agents benefit from the intransparency within the supply chain.
- The industry shall look upon past initiatives and previous major transformational changes to drive change, for instance AIS introduction about 20 years ago. Despite, legal mandatory requirements’ vision, AIS data has led the way to innovative solutions and myriad opportunities for digital services.
- Terminal operators are key enablers of situational awareness, and, therefore, the basis for a multi-modal end-to-end logistics and transport chain visibility. Furthermore, carriers play a crucial role in the multi-tier networks for enabling actionable insights if the necessary minimal data set of cargo movements and operational data is shared to immediate downstream actors, one of VWT principles. Additionally, data sharing is limited to their two succeeding downstream actors in a cargo owner’s chain.
- Beneficial Cargo Owners (BCOs) have legal/contractual power to instruct freight forwarders, logistics services providers, carriers, and other actors along the chain to share data related to their cargo and respective movements. Within VWT, a Power of Attorney (PoA) is empowering data transfers to specific partners, which could develop future trust and value delivery for customer retaining.
- End-to-end metromaps have successfully driven agreement on when (in which order), what, and with whom data should be shared in processes of collaborative decision making (CDM) for different transport modes.
- In the VWT setting, the data sovereignty of each partner is protected through the pre-agreed purpose and scope of use of the data shared with the VWT.
- The VWT leverages existing efforts using Transport Collaboration Message Format (TCMF) and other standards, e.g., those created by the Digital Container Shipping Association (DCSA) and the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT).
- The platform’s approach has included several indicators and warning to prevail data quality, seen as the biggest roadblock for solution’s success, service level and sustainability goals.
- Data reliability is checked for missing data, conflicting data, conflicting infrastructure logic or unreasonable relationship. Generating valuable sustainability and efficiency data insights necessitates and relies on accurate, timely data related to the movement of cargo and underlying operations.
- Additionally, warning mechanisms are put in place to analyse if operations are according to plan, likely to fall in a potential deviation or already deviated, empowering disruption’s awareness and management.
“A minimalistic set of data is shared between different VWTs to increase visibility and generate additional chain insights produced by services/modules operated in different VWTs, improving outputs for better individual and collaborative decision-making.”
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