CargoSmart Limited has announced last week the availability of Big Schedules, a new sailing schedule search platform that helps shippers and logistics service providers manage and visualize their ocean routes.

Big Schedules sources ocean carriers‘ published sailing schedules and live vessel location data to provide personalized search results for faster and greater insights to improve shipment planning. The new, free sailing schedule search engine is available at www.bigschedules.com.

According to CargoSmart, a global shipment management software provider, shippers struggled to obtain the latest sailing schedules, to make bookings, and to communicate updates to receiving parties during the U.S. West Coast severe port congestion that occurred over the last year.

“Despite port congestion improving,” said Lionel Louie, chief commercial officer of CargoSmart, “over five million sailing schedule changes around the globe occurred in the month of May 2015 alone. Not having the latest schedules can have a costly impact including inaccurate bookings, increased demurrage charges, and missed container cut-off times.”

The new sailing schedule search platform leverages big data sources, noted Louie. “By gathering data from multiple sources and using new technologies to streamline the search process,” he explained, “Big Schedules empowers shippers and logistics service providers to search for the latest schedule information, faster, and to gain insights for planning.”

Big Schedules delivers up-to-date sailing schedules by retrieving schedule data from multiple sources and displaying it in a flexible platform. The product’s scope includes 30 major ocean carriers, over 46,000 port pairs, and nearly 5,000 vessel services, covering 90 percent of the world’s container capacity.

The new sailing schedule platform helps shipment parties link sailing schedules with vessel, service, and shipment information to provide a single view of their ocean schedules and to visualize shipment routes. Schedule data is updated continuously and search results display the vessel’s current location on a map for users to see if a vessel is on track to meet its schedule and to improve planning.

The platform remembers users’ recent searches, saved favorite searches, and the overall top port-pair searches to make recommendations to search faster and save time. Users can also look up schedule reliability percentages and average delay deviations by carrier for five popular port-pairs to gauge the chances of on-time arrivals.