LOGISTICS: IT SOLUTIONS & 3PL SURVEY 2008 - OceanSchedules offers comprehensive approach to navigating ocean carrier sailing schedules A little over a year after its launch, OceanSchedules has become the go-to web-based platform for shippers to navigate ocean carriers schedules.By George Lauriat,AJOTOceanSchedules is a unique e-commerce web-based product As the name implies, Parsippany, NJ-based OceanSchedules.com, is designed to deliver up-to-date ocean carrier liner sailing schedules right to their EDI doorstep of shippers, freight forwarders, NVOs and others… and importantly, OceanSchedulues provides this service free of charge. According to Andy Barrons, Managing Director of OceanSchedules, “The concept in the beginning was to construct a ‘virtual’ ocean schedule management system for shippers and forwarders that would enable them to search and download voyage data quickly and easily.” To accomplish that goal, the company had to be able to on one-hand accumulate and process a respectable portion of the ocean carrier sailing schedules to give the service traction and secondly present the information in a manner that the users would feel comfortable adopting. Both elements required an operating system that was multi-platformed and scalable. Since launching a little over a year ago, the company now hosts over 80% of the global container operator schedules on the site amounting to around nine million voyage options. Impressive as the number is, Barrons says that number will to grow as more schedules are added from intra-Asian services and services in the greater Indian Ocean region. From the shipper side of the equation, OceanSchedules currently has nearly 8,000 registered users and 32,000 unique users per month. Broadly speaking, shippers enter targeted searches via either port-to-port or point-to-point for single or multi-carrier searches 24/7. The shipper also can also simply target the carrier or port of choice. The screens are intuitive and require little work up. In addition, contact carrier buttons appear on each schedule results page, enabling the shipper to forward requests for quotes or additional information in real-time to the ocean carriers. Barrons says that studies of registered users indicate that 34% of users make six or more searches per week, 42% have contacted a carrier and 52% have selected a carrier based on OceanSchedules’ information. SCHEDULE MANAGER The guts of the interactive system are built around the proprietary “Schedule Manager” format. The “Schedule Manager” allows the shipper to interact with data via:
  • A count of the number of matches to your search criteria
  • Draggable sliders that automatically re-calculate and display the search by departure date range, arrival date range and transit time.
  • Interactive filters for day of the week for departure and arrival
  • Interactive filters for port selection (when multiple adjacent ports are available
  • Interactive filters for carrier selection
Other features a user can employ, include nominating preferred carriers and preferred arrival/departure day of the week in “Preferences” so that Schedule Manager automatically filters schedules by these parameters. There is also the Carrier-Contact-Request button which when clicked will request that the shippers’ selected carrier contacts them about a specific voyage. Another helpful is the auto-suggestion feature. When a shipper uses the “search” by port-to-port or point-to-point the auto-suggestion feature helps find the right name for the location after you type in at least three characters. Finally, the system enables shippers to “download and save search results” for further analysis, that is helpful when comparing multiple routings such as US East Coast versus US West Coast options. In the tests that the AJOT ran on the system, the response time was very good and the carrier schedules updates on the system corresponded well to services offered through other carrier and thir