CargoSphere, the cloud-based rate management platform, has announced a direct data feed of ocean rates and tariffs for the global trade lanes from Hapag-Lloyd, the fifth largest container shipping line in the world, to its customers.

The ocean carrier is the first to offer its customers automatic access to all their contract rates using CargoSphere’s electronic Smart Upload and Diagnostics Solution (eSUDS). This integration is a dramatic improvement over current labor-intensive industry practices of frequent email distribution of carrier-proprietary file attachments.

“Eliminating the email distribution of spreadsheets and PDFs is an exciting moment for Hapag-Lloyd,” said Henning Schleyerbach, a senior director at Hapag-Lloyd. “We are committed to improving efficiency for our customers and ourselves, and this joint Hapag-Lloyd/CargoSphere integration achievement is an important contribution to the industry as it improves timeliness and accuracy. We plan to continue differentiating ourselves from our competitors with ongoing innovation.”

CargoSphere’s digital rate-processing solution “is fast, fully automated and ready to transform the inefficiencies that impede ocean carriers,” said Neil Barni, managing director of CargoSphere. “By accelerating the conversion of ocean freight rates to a fully standardized digital environment we are bringing to market a genuine and meaningful innovation that will move the industry forward.”

The CargoSphere platform offers a 100 percent digital infrastructure, in which eSUDS establishes an automated data transfer of contract and public tariff rates between an ocean carrier, CargoSphere and the ocean carrier’s customers. Digital contract management significantly increases accuracy and  reduces processing times from several days to just a few hours.

Shipper, freight forwarder, and NVOCC customers can now have visibility to their own new or amended service contract rates as supplied by Hapag-Lloyd to the CargoSphere platform. This provides a more efficient and timely process to transform this traditionally complex, time consuming, error prone and costly aspect of ocean shipping.

A Drewry Research Study from 2017 determined that the annual labor cost of finding, receiving, processing, and analyzing ocean freight buy rates for the global freight forwarding community was approximately $500 million.

CargoSphere’s platform is designed to deliver significant efficiency and accuracy to international forwarders, ocean carriers and shippers. Users’ global offices will have access to accurate, timely rates for better decision making, they will benefit from time savings for sales and operational staff, faster reconciliation of invoices, and increased accuracy of buy rates. The platform can also deliver sales-related benefits including faster quoting to customers, more frequent selection of optimal bookings, increased customer satisfaction and the ability to share accurate Hapag-Lloyd rates in real-time with agent partners.