Supply chain

As author of the Q&A column, Colin Barrett answered detailed and often obscure legal questions on shipping for 48 years, educating generations of shippers.

European truckload broker sennder has vaulted into the upper reaches of venture capital-based logistics startups with a $160 million funding round and a $1 billion valuation.

A partnership between widely used rate management software provider Portrix and container line digital quoting platform BlueX Trade is yet another sign of the need for forwarders to get direct access to digital quotes offered by carriers.

Shippers have used the spot trucking market to account for volume surges in 2020, but they can use data to better calibrate their contracts, including short-term deals, freight procurement expert Heather Mueller tells JOC Uncharted.

New customs formalities came into effect on Jan. 1, when the Brexit transition period ended and the UK effectively became a “third country,” but DB Schenker says incomplete documentation was creating significant delays.

A new administration and Congress offer a new chance to break infrastructure spending gridlock, the head of the US Chamber of Commerce says. Meanwhile, the American Society of Civil Engineers fixes a $13 trillion two-decade cost on delaying repairs.

Budget limitations are forcing forwarders to choose between investing in customer-facing tools that could help grow their market share or back-end automation that could help them extract more profit from existing business.

Post-Brexit trade changes will add an extra layer of complexity to the UK’s cross-border e-commerce market.

A growing number of forwarders are taking the bold step of chartering ships as a way to directly control shipping capacity and provide more reliable services.

Federal Maritime Commissioner Carl Bentzel is looking into ways that Houston could handle larger vessels before a widening project is complete, given a Texas law that puts size limits on port calls.

A new law that requires the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to develop a plan to use X-rays or similar technology to scan all cars, trucks, and freight trains entering the country could cause a flare up of chronic congestion issues at the southern border.

The third party logistics provider SEKO Logistics has its eyes on tripling revenue over the next five years, leading it to turn to the private equity market for investment for the second time in five years.

Marianne Rowden, the longtime public face of a key importer-exporter lobbying group, is stepping down at the end of March as e-commerce growth makes the interaction between shippers and the public sector all the more vital.

Frustrated shippers and forwarders want European competition authorities to take action against what they have labeled market distorting practices by container carriers.

Logistics managers that saw their organization's supply chains disrupted and transportation budgets blown out of the water in 2020 will be at the epicenter of make-or-break decisions in the coming year.

Migrating away from traditional spreadsheet-based freight procurement is becoming a priority for shippers as they move toward more frequent bids and seek to avoid data silos.

Third-party logistics provider GlobalTranz saw a strong increase in demand for managed transportation service in 2020 and expects the outsourcing trend to continue as supply chain disruption spills into 2021.

The backdrop to the Maersk statement is how the supply chain meltdown has reverberated politically in the US and the potential for where it could lead next.

Technology provider Turvo has attempted to redefine what a transportation management system is since it emerged in 2017, and now it’s targeting big shippers and logistics providers dealing with multiple systems.

The as-yet-unfulfilled promise of expedited cargo clearance for shippers under US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) trade facilitation programs may soon come at a cost of compulsory self-regulation

A logistics technology provider for US importers is taking a counterintuitive approach to driving adoption of software by making its system function similarly to Microsoft Excel while gradually driving customized modernization in the background.

The integration between AscendTMS’s widely-used transportation management software with predictive pricing and historical benchmark trucking data from DAT Solutions is a signal that users of such systems want more value piped directly into the platforms on which they rely.

Visibility provider project44 has raised $100 million in its latest funding round to build out its multimodal platform while hinting it may seek to go public in the next two years.

Freightos has developed an application programming interface (API) to allow e-commerce marketplaces to plug international freight services directly into their broader offerings to business-to-business sellers.

There’s debate about how much of a knock-on effect COVID-19 vaccine distribution could have on other types of cargoes, but US shippers are cautioned to plan for some disruption.

Less-than-containerload (LCL) operators are driving the bulk of technology development in their market owing to its niche nature and inherent complexity, but that may change as more volume gravitates to LCL.

Convoy is integrating with AscendTMS, another sign of the importance of enabling small truckload carriers with software to manage driver dispatch and scheduling, which helps give shippers electronic access to more capacity.

Momentum for software that helps small carriers manage their businesses keeps growing, with CloudTrucks getting $20.5 million in venture capital to build its “virtual carrier” model and an instant pay product for drivers.

Supply chain management software provider Blue Yonder is suing its competitor Kinaxis over alleged patent infringements that Blue Yonder says have cost it $20 million in customer deals.

BlueX Trade and Catapult are partnering to pipe instant rates from BlueX’s container line customers to Catapult’s forwarder customers, a further sign that instant quoting is gaining traction as an alternative to traditional spot quoting.

A technology-based freight broker has spun out its technology as a standalone transportation management system (TMS), signaling the need to better connect small carriers to surface capacity for shippers.

Interest in drop-and-hook programs continues to grow, with the broker Transfix now offering an “asset-like” service that it says it uses technology to find the right capacity for its shipper customers.

The extraction of data from commercial invoices is a sort of holy grail in the world of logistics automation software, and solutions providers are seeing demand from logistics providers as they hone in on this area.

3Gtms caters primarily to large enterprise US domestic shippers that have complex freight transportation networks.

The Digital Container Shipping Association’s latest effort is targeting a long sought-after goal in maritime and logistics — a paperless bill of lading — by making it standardized and interoperable.

A startup enterprise communication software provider, with roots in the maritime industry and with traction among global traders, announced a $10 million funding round.

Demand for detailed carbon emissions data is growing, evidenced by the integration of SeaRoutes’ data into the platforms of third-party logistics providers and global transportation and rate management systems.

Fulfillment providers are offering warehouse space and technology to help retailers focus more on e-commerce and better position inventory for faster last-mile delivery.

Trucking software provider Baton is building drop-and-hook relay networks in large cities to allow long-haul truckers to avoid first- and last-mile congestion and dwell time.

Freight broker Transfix will integrate predictive visibility data from project44 to augment its existing app-based GPS location data as part of a long-term agreement with the multimodal visibility provider.