Global Cargo Monitoring / Cargo Tracking / Supply Chain Intelligence

I just stumbled over an article from Peter T. Leach on JOC.com about "West Coast congestion points to need for greater shipment visibility". see JOC article here The quote in the title of this blog is from an anonymous importer in Peter's article. We, at arviem, can fully support the message from this anonymous importer as well as Peter's article. arviem's real-time cargo monitoring services can provide that greater visibility. The arviem services allow among other benefits the independent calculation of the estimated time of arrival (ETA) as well as anytime visibility of the actual position of all cargo in transit. With the data coming from the cargo directly, at the edge of the supply chain, arviem is independent from any data sources of any other party in the supply chain, that "aren't up-to-date" quoting Peter's article again. With a very user friendly arviem dashboard, shippers will not be faced with the challenges described by ...

Chris Sciacca from IBM in an interview with Stefan Reidy from arviem: http://supplychainsrock.blogspot.ch/2015/02/arviems-ceo-talks-about-becoming-google.html

It’s all about logistics! But most of us do not even notice its existence. These days we can buy nearly every product in the world online and receive it at home within a few days. Millions of goods are packed, collected, stored, transported, transshipped and delivered daily. Many of these shipments do need special care because their contents are.. perishable fragile dangerous time-critical of high value critical in terms of humidity or shock That is where arviem’s Cargo Monitoring Services come into play. But for once I do not want to talk about the needs or the benefits our system is providing to our customers. This time I would like to introduce you to arviem’s Operations and I would like to let you take a short look behind the scenes. Arviem Operations takes care of the daily business. The team ensures safe and on time deliveries and does the entire backend setup. Our Operations team works globally and deals with different cultures, and management levels as well as with...

One of the main problems our clients from all different industries encounter in terms of damage of cargo in transit is the moisture and condensation – especially on those shipments with long transit time. It is common practice to use moisture absorbing ‘desiccant’ bags in order to minimize the risk – but once saturated, they serve no further purpose. Also the risk is rather the condensation, which will happen depending on the dew point. Desiccant bags may marginally reduce the dew-point-threshold, but they can’t eliminate the risk of condensation. The Relative humidity of an average shipment can easily vary between 40% and 90%. However, the up and down of the relative humidity is not always relevant and most likely will not affect the cargo as the container is a closed ecosystem. Assuming a temperature of 11.5 °C with a relative humidity of 91% inside the container would lead to a dew point of 10.1 °C. Desiccant bags may reduce the relative humidity inside the container to 89% or ...

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/dec/10/silk-railway-freight-train-from-china-pulls-into-madrid The longest rail link in the world and the first direct link between China and Spain is up and running after a train from Yiwu in coastal China completed its maiden journey of 8,111 miles to Madrid. En route it passed through Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, Poland, Germany and France before arriving at the Abroñigal freight terminal in Madrid. The railway has been dubbed the “21st-century Silk Road” by Li Qiang, the governor of Zhejiang province, where Yiwu is located. Its route is longer than the Trans-Siberian railway and the Orient Express. The first train was met by the mayor of Madrid, Ana Botella, and Spain’s minister of public works, Ana Pastor. It consisted of 30 containers carrying 1,400 tonnes of cargo – mostly toys, stationery and other items for sale over Christmas across Europe. According to China’s ambassador to Spain, Zhu Banzao, it will return laden with win...

The news called it a historic agreement, when U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping announced in a historic climate change deal, that both countries would curb their greenhouse gas emissions over the next two decades. The agreement will give confidence to both companies and investors to support clean energy investment and technological innovation that will ensure the necessary capacity to meet or exceed the stated targets. The idea and the objective is not new, but the agreement sends a powerful signal to the business community, which is pushing more forcefully for coordinated policies and clear market signals to deal with climate change. For example: Nike’s environmental goal for logistics and transportation is to achieve a 30% reduction in carbon emissions by 2020. This is a pretty aggressive goal taking into account a growing business. The US-China agreement may supports Nike’s (and other companies’) strategic decision and hopefully encourages m...

A transportation management system (TMS) helps companies move freight from origin to destination efficiently, reliably, and cost effectively. In a TMS survey, ARC found that respondents indicated freight savings of approximately 6 percent with the use of a TMS application. TMS achieve these savings based on process enforcement, visibility, analytics, and optimization. Whereas process enforcement and optimization are based on visibility and analytics – any visibility benefits or any analytics functionality is only as good as the data quality and the currentness of data processed. Capgemini also indicates, that the demand for global visibility is increasing and that shippers want to know where everything is located across the entire supply chain at any given point. Shippers today are still challenged by disparate systems, an obstacle no serious global shipper can afford. The conclusion is: real-time data is key in order to achieve visibility, analytics, optimization and process ...

Nestlé has implemented a cost-effective solution for real-time monitoring of thousands of container movements around the globe each year. The system has significantly increased supply chain visibility bringing a number of operational, strategic and financial benefits. IGD SupplyChainAnalysis

Forget about Siri! Talking to your iPhone is certainly cool. But you still have to tell Siri what you want and what Siri has to look for. Wouldn’t it be great, if your phone would anticipate, what you want to ask and give you the answer before you have even asked for? The same probably the case with supply chain managers. It is certainly cool to “talk” to the ERP system and get the system do the planning, the ordering, the invoicing, …. But like with my iPhone – every day I manually have to turn on the silent mode, when I go to bed, or I have to turn on the airplane mode when entering the airplane, or turn on/off Bluetooth for my headset in the office. I want these things to happen automatically, so I don’t have to worry about them anymore. Likewise the supply chain manager: He most likely would also appreciate, if certain actions would happen automatically and he did not have to worry about. So – how to make the supply chain read your mind? My answer to this...

A few weeks ago, we published a sad story in our blog about refugees discovered in Morocco. Now, another such sad story got published by BBC (see below). Real-time cargo monitoring could not only safe live but also prevent gangs from their brutal trade with human lives. **** http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-28817688 BBC News -  16 August 2014 A man has died after 35 people - including children - were found in a shipping container at Tilbury Docks. The survivors - believed to be from the Indian subcontinent - are said to be recovering "fairly quickly in most cases" at nearby hospitals. They were discovered after a freighter arrived from Zeebrugge, Belgium at about 06:00 BST and was being unloaded. Essex Police have launched a homicide investigation and officers are being assisted by their Belgian counterparts. Supt Trevor Roe said staff at the docks were alerted to the container by "screaming and banging" from inside. He said about 50...