The last several years have seen dramatic variability in demand within the ocean container industry. Whether it be trade-wars or global demand shocks due to Covid-19, this variability has created an opportunity for carriers that can more efficiently match supply and demand.
The Freight Commerce Platform was built to enable carriers to react more efficiently in a world with significant variability. Leveraging the latest in AI, the platform links the online world with the physical container world with the following insights:
- The demand variability of the spot market provides the opportunity to optimize product mixes and freight revenue
- Reaction speed to the variability using predictive insights enables revenue maximization
- Real-time demand and container visibility is the key to optimal asset allocations
While BlueX is the first neutral Freight Commerce Platform, Maersk has already made significant investments to address the opportunity. The Great Maersk Shift outlines this digital transformation but also recognizes the advantages that asset-based ocean carriers like Maersk have:
“Maersk maintains valuable real-time information and market strength to shape pricing….The two other advantages that a full asset owner in the container space can leverage is the ability to combine data and containers for new and smarter services, as well as improved exception management for actually changing the trajectory of shipments when containers are underway.”
To leverage these advantages, Maersk made investments into a digital Spot Market with Dynamic Pricing (Maersk Spot) and is currently building out its ability to allocate container assets through investments in real-time tracking. We at BlueX have equally been investing in our own solution that’s tailored for ocean carriers to digitally scale their enterprises.
How?
BlueX enables ocean carriers with a white-label platform to generate insights to match container supply and shipper demand to optimize pricing and enhance asset control, leading to optimal revenues.
BlueX's white-label E-commerce spot solution facilitates ocean carriers to predict the demand variability of the spot market and optimize freight revenue. This is managed through artificial intelligence, which predicts demand using dozens of real-time and historical inputs such as freight buy rates, online search rates, seasonality, currency fluctuations, trade lane events, and more.
Figure 1: Predicted Spot Demand: AI vs. Carrier Tools
The outcome of an AI system is predictive data that better reflects the actual demand in the market. Through relevant inputs that determine shipper demand, the Freight Commerce Platform can better predict future freight demand leading to more accurate demand predictions.
BlueX’s AI-driven Pricing provides real-time predictive pricing, leading to the optimization of revenues. By using dozens of real-time inputs the AI pricing module effectively estimates customer elasticity and suggests an optimal price and strategy until a shipment closing date.
Figure 2: AI-Driven Spot Price Predictions & Revenue vs. Carrier Models
The result is that the optimized price can lead to significant revenue improvements over carriers' current pricing models.
BlueX's AI-driven Asset Allocation is essential in tying demand insights into the physical container assets. This is critical in achieving revenue optimization, where there are gaps in actual demand and asset availability.
Figure 3: AI-Driven Asset Allocation Prediction vs. Carrier Models
Holistic predictive pricing solutions need to account for the availability and costs of physical assets and their movement. Any gaps in container assets need to be optimized across the fleet. The Freight Commerce Platform is the ideal solution to optimize this outcome.
The Freight Commerce Platform is the BlueX digital solution that matches carrier supply with customer demand. Our E-commerce FreighTech platform runs parallel to carrier systems as a bolted-on extension and has been built from the ground up as a carrier white-label platform.
Freight Commerce Platform Elements
The key product elements of the neutral platform include:
- White-label Spot Market with Dynamic Pricing and Dynamic Asset Allocation
- APIs and Web Tools - Facilitates integration between the FCP and 3rd party data and systems
- AI & Intelligent Carrier Tools - A full suite of AI tools that provide predictive insights to the largest carriers’ optimization problems
- Legacy System Integration - Integration with existing ocean carrier systems (as a bolted-on extension) to empower carriers with the Freight Commerce Platform
- Information Security - Enterprise-class information security
All of the above elements power the FCP to offer the tools vital to all ocean carriers to predictably price and allocate containers in a spot market.
Figure 4: The Freight Commerce Platform
Since 2016, Maersk spent years developing its spot market and AI-driven insights into pricing and asset allocation. Catching up to their level of innovation and FreighTech is possible. With the BlueX Freight Commerce Platform, ocean carriers have a neutral and scalable strategy to realign their operations to match market forces digitally.
Enabling ocean carriers to match container supply and customer demand is at the core of BlueX. Predicting supply and demand, understanding customer needs, and digitally managing operations for greater revenue like Maersk is a reality on BlueX.
The impacts are potentially game-changing. Ocean carriers that have partnered with BlueX have seen up to a 10% improvement in their container revenue through our solution.
But these revenue impacts are just the tip of the iceberg. For example, Maersk created a variety of new freight products and services from its learnings. By analyzing customers' needs based on the big data accumulated, Maersk is pinpointing customer pain points and paying points and is removing the commoditization of their freight.
We at BlueX provide our ocean carrier's the tools and insights to make these transformative leaps. The question now is, are you ready to take advantage of the Freight Commerce Platform? If yes, get in touch and start your journey to enable greater revenues and long-term success digitally.