From March 2000 issue of Marine Digest
For carriers and freight intermediaries
it's time
By Richard Knee |
| It took three years for Samuel Shapiro & Company to rewrite its information system (IS). Why so long?
"Shippers have a variety of needs," said Bob Kimmel, information services director at the venerable, Baltimore-based freight intermediary firm. "Some just want their cargo moved. Some want complete information, down to the color of the shoelaces on the shoes that they're having shipped."
So, Kimmel said, the company had to design a system flexible enough to accommodate the variances in shippers" information requirements. "We did it by 'hiding' certain screens that are not applicable to certain customers," he said. How well carriers and freight intermediaries can provide timely, thorough and accurate information, often at a moment's notice, has been of growing importance to shippers since the mid-1980s. And it's not just interface with suppliers and customers that comes into play; carriers and freight intermediaries have to deal as well with myriad government agencies that rely increasingly on automation to improve the time- and cost-efficiency of their operations. Missing or erroneous data on an import entry or a Shipper's Export Declaration can cause all kinds of headaches for the shipper, the consignee and everyone in between. To customs brokers, the clarion warning came, often to their annoyance, from William von Raab, who was Customs commissioner in the Reagan Administration. "Automate or perish," he said. The message was at first misconstrued; many people, even within Customs, viewed Von Raab as despotic, and many brokers thought he was wielding a verbal club. In fact, he was talking business sense and even his harshest critics now credit him with "dragging Customs kicking and screaming into the 20th century." For freight intermediaries, competition can come from any or all of three sources: rival companies within their own industry; carriers or carrier groups that try to cut out the middleman; and shippers or consignees that interface on their own with carriers and government regulators. "There are some large corporations that do some of their own brokerage and freight forwarding. They're not the target of our marketing," Kimmel said. |
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