Reducing risks by digitising processes

Background

Our customer, a South East Asian seafood exporter, is a leading supplier of shrimp.

Shrimp farming is a lucrative 19.1 billion USD international industry with time-tested techniques, processing methods and supply chains. Containers of shrimp worth upwards of 200,000 USD travel safe and trouble-free around the world thanks to state-of-the-art refrigerated containers, or Reefers.

Solution

With the aim of eliminating the risk of lost, stolen or late BLs in Reefer cargo delivery, we worked with the customer and offered our TradeLens electronic Bill of Lading (eBL) solution. With the COVID-19 lockdown, their opportunity had arrived to use new and innovative digital solutions to solve documentation challenges. They signed up to use TradeLens along with their New York based customs broker, and 59 hours later, their first TradeLens eBL was released.

This solution included reducing the number of steps in the BL process to 4:

• We execute and issue the eBL to the customer’s TradeLens account
• The customer checks that the BL has been received in their TradeLens account and all the details are correct
• They click a button to transfer the eBL to their U.S. agent
• The U.S. agent clicks a button to surrender the eBL back to Maersk at the destination and we proceed to release the cargo

Result

By reducing the number of steps involved in a BL’s journey from 8 to 4, the customer cut down the entire process from 3 weeks to just 3 days. The biggest time savings came from the elimination of the air courier leg, which also saved them about 50 USD per BL —potential savings of over 5000 USD per year.