By George Lauriat, AJOT In December, INTTRA, the Parsippany, NJ-based, e-solutions provider, unveiled their new NVOCC e-commerce platform. The new e-commerce platform had been in testing for a year with ECU Line, a global NVO and now the product’s first official customer, although there are nearly a hundred NVOs already aboard. Franky Van Doren, CEO CEE W-E-S Africa and Senior VP of Sales and Marketing for the Antwerp-based ECU-Line said, “We joined INTTRA to receive transactions electronically, and this is an additional tool to serve our customers. We [ECU Line] expect the INTTRA network to be our fastest growing electronic documentation channel.” Rob Haney, Senior Director of the NVOCC product Line for INTTRA said that adding the NVOs into INTTRA’s established network of ocean carriers, forwarders and shippers “completes the picture. NVOs will have the same plug and play benefits that shippers and carriers already have within the e-commerce platform. It’s a monstrous network…we [INTTRA] handle more than 350,000 box orders a week.” It’s hard to underestimate the potential of a neutral platform dedicated to the LCL business. As Haney says, “We want this to become the Facebook of shipping e-comm platforms.” The pilot program with ECU Line worked out the kinks in a complex e-platform designed to handle LCL traffic and has INTTRA rolling with NVO signups from the largest to the smallest. “For the larger NVOs it takes a little more time to set up because of the global nature and the systems that they already have in place,” Haney said. “With the smaller and mid-size NVOs, they usually have tight central control (smaller management), and we [INTTRA] can customize the e-platform and fill out what’s missing.” In the case of ECU Lines, Van Doren said of the implementation of the INTTRA e-comm platform, “ECU Lines performs very similar transactions to vessel operating carriers – we need to take booking and cargo details from our customers and INTTRA’s tools. It is an additional system on top of the existing ECU Line EDI and ECU WEB EDI in operation for so many years.” According to Haney, what’s really useful about the new platform is that a medium sized NVO really can build an all-purpose transactional platform that connects to a first class network. Even beyond the sheer computing power the NVO is instantly visible throughout the network – a valuable tool for “market awareness” in its own right. “When we talk to an NVO we try to build a ‘heat map’ – a strategy to fill in the white spaces in the customers’ e-commerce tools,” Haney explained. “We’re really not that complex,” Haney said. “We’re trying to take the repetitive manual entry out of the process.” LCL e-processing (a large number of items in a box) for the NVO market compared to FCL processing required a re-thinking of the business model. “We went to a transactional pricing model, similar to cell phones,” Haney explained. Haney says the “roll out” of the new NVOCC e-commerce is truly global in scope. INTTRA has over 300 employees worldwide and the network includes some 20,000 plus locations. In regions like Latin America, Asia and India, the strength of the network helps North American NVOs seamlessly connect with their counterparts – it gives a market awareness that’s instantaneous. Because of the sheer size of the network, the group can work on building, through advisory groups, e-commerce standards that can be adopted to simplify communications…perhaps a little like Facebook.