oTMS adds real-time visibility for global air and ocean shipments, extending its shipment tracking coverage beyond China borders.

Since the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020, foreign trade experienced difficult times, including difficulties in resuming work, cancellation of orders, foreign trade restrictions, sky-rocketing freight rates and other obstacles mounted. Even as COVID-19 epidemic is largely over, other geo-political events continue to cause trade and shipping disruptions, exposing legacy supply chain fragility in these “new normal” circumstances. What measures should companies take to improve their international logistics management and control capabilities and boost their confidence? Adding comprehensive visibility for their import and export shipments across all the transport modes, end-to-end is going to significantly boost their ability to manage their inventory in transit, identify bottlenecks in their supply chains and compare carrier performance against their promised SLAs.

International air and sea freight rates are still close to their peak levels and while carriers and forwarders offer various products with different lead-times it is paramount to track their performance and compare it against both their promises and other alternatives.

Same time, supply chain and shipping disruptions can cause delivery dates promised to the customers to slide significantly, having real-time shipment visibility and dynamically re-calculated ETAs can significantly boost shippers ability to manage customers expectations and often make re-adjustments before it’s too late.

As a pioneer of transportation management platform, oTMS has won the favor and recognition of many leading enterprises through the connecting multiple parties on a common workflow transportation management system since its launch in 2013. Using SaaS + mobile APP + API + IOT, oTMS covers road, express and multi-modal shipments within China mainland, incl. real-time visibility, freight cost management, optimization, billing, dock appointment and BI analytics.

Late 2021, we have upgraded this coverage with global air & sea shipment tracking that extends oTMS capability from mainland to any import and export shipment flows. It has been achieved by integration of recognized 3^rd party software that comes with pre-integration of  45 container shipping lines, 91 airlines as well as detailed status data from all major Chinese and US seaports and China and US customs offices. This coverage keeps expanding.

International logistics solutions and case studies

Take a well-known health care product and personal care product company as an example, its business covers more than 80 countries and regions around the world, and its transportation business includes import and export, covering land, sea and air transportation. Imported goods mainly flow to China from Japan, South Korea, the United States, and Australia; export products mainly flow to Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and other countries. There are two warehouses in China to store imported raw materials, imported finished products, purchased products and factory-produced products.

The company has carried out digital reform a few years ago, and launched the oTMS TMS transportation management system on the domestic logistics side, which improves its upstream and downstream information coordination capabilities and overall logistics control. After the epidemic, customers expected to improve its overseas transportation, so they joined hands with oTMS again to expand the application of the system, and realized functions such as overseas cargo tracking, advance reservations for entering and leaving warehouses, and sea and air transportation status inquiry after going abroad.

Taking export as an example, through oTMS system, after the customer submits the order transportation demand in the system, the order is intelligently assigned to the carrier. Carriers can receive orders and maintain drivers and vehicles in the system. After the carrier receives the order, it makes an appointment for the warehouse dock, and the system automatically allocates the pickup appointment order and the arrival appointment order. After the warehouse confirms the appointment plan, the driver receives the warehouse appointment order. When the driver arrives at the warehouse, they waits in line to be called and then loaded. After the driver picks up the goods, they leave the warehouse and transport the goods to the port. In this process, the status of the goods can be tracked in real time. Afterwards, for international shipping order, they system can generate the shipping bill of lading number and the shipping company code to query the shipping node. For air freight orders, you can fill in the airline’s two-character code and bill of lading number to check the air freight node. Therefore, the tracking of orders at home and abroad can be realized on the same platform, which greatly increases the management efficiency.

In the post-epidemic era, enterprises need to identify growth points and strength points. Import and export enterprises should increase the digital transformation of logistics and accumulate more strength for improving comprehensive competitiveness. To meeting the growing needs of customers, oTMS further expands its business to warehouse dock management and import and export tracking. In the future, oTMS will continue to adhere to the principle of pioneering and innovation, and strive to make transportation more intelligent.