Top Logistics Provider Utilizing Real-Time Supply Chain Visibility to Track Ocean Freight

The Challenge

Our customer, a world-leading logistics provider earlier faced the challenge of lacking visibility on the location and status of containers while working with numerous global ocean carriers.

To achieve full visibility and know exactly the status of all shipments, they needed to receive automatically EDI312* and EDI315* status messages from the carriers. However, our customer is using a different message format, therefore beside the need for connectivity with all the partners, there was also the challenge of translating EDI messages into another format.

The Solution

To acquire accurate data on all shipments from multiple carriers, our customer chose to utilize Youredi’s integration platform as a service (iPaaS).

The process is following:

1. Carrier sends Youredi EDI 312 and/or EDI 315 messages.
2. EDI 997 confirmation message is sent to the shipper by Youredi as an acknowledgment that we received the status messages.
3. Translate EDI 312 & EDI 315 messages from the shippers into our customer's internal message format.
4. Enriching and validating the data to ensure that the data is 100% clean.
5. Sending the completed messages to our customer's FTP server.

Additionally, the customer creates a Master Data .csv report daily for Youredi with data such as tracking code and Bill of Lading number. The document includes 7 fields of each container of which 3 is mandatory. With the help of this document, Youredi automatically enriches EDI 312 and EDI 315 messages. If the enrichment was successful, the message is marked as successful and will be forwarded to the customer’s FTP server. If some mandatory data is missing, the document will be marked as non-completed and for 3 days Youredi will try to enrich it again before we send an error message.

The Benefit

Creating a completely tailored solution according to the needs of our customer helped them to automate the process of receiving real-time data on shipments. This has reduced the amount of time spent on manual data entry, therefore ensured the constant flow of accurate data as part of more efficient, streamlined processes.

Full visibility into the statuses of containers means that managing to ship globally becomes easier and more time-efficient, improving overall productivity and order fulfillment. The data collected can be also utilized as insights for better forecasting and planning.

Insights

*EDI 312 - ARRIVAL NOTICE (OCEAN)

The transaction can be used to provide all the necessary information for a consignee to receive a shipment including customs, payments due, and estimated arrival date & time of shipment.

*EDI 315 - STATUS DETAILS (OCEAN)

The transaction set can be used to provide all the information necessary to report status or event details for selected shipments or containers. It is intended to accommodate the details of one status or event associated with many shipments or containers, as well as more than one status or event for one shipment or container.

*EDI 997 - FUNCTIONAL ACKNOWLEDGEMENT (FA)

It is sent as a response to other EDI transactions received and serves as a receipt to acknowledge that an EDI transaction or a group of transactions was received. However, this document is only acknowledging that another EDI file was received, it does not tell whether the document had errors or met all business requirements.