The GT Nexus Shipper Council, a community group of supply chain executives representing large global enterprises, has recognized Hapag-Lloyd, one of the world’s leading container liner shipping companies, as the winner of the 2016 Ocean Performance Award.

Hapag-Lloyd operates a fleet of 175 modern container ships. The company has approximately 9,400 employees at 361 sites in 118 countries. Hapag-Lloyd has a container fleet of 1.6 million TEU including one of the world’s largest reefer fleets. The company operates 122 liner services worldwide.

“Ocean carriers throughout the GT Nexus community take this award very seriously and each year they strive to out-perform their colleagues in customer service and data quality,” said Maryanna Kersten, senior manager of international logistics at Del Monte and chairperson of the Shipper Council. “Hapag-Lloyd again performed exceptionally well this year after winning the award in 2010 and 2012 based on the data benchmarks shared amongst the community. We congratulate them on their leadership and commitment.”

GT Nexus provides a collaborative digital platform that fosters data sharing cross-network and enables the entire customer community to improve performance based on standardized performance benchmarks and best practices. Data available through the GT Nexus platform provides calculated metrics related to data quality, responsiveness, onboarding times and customer service.

“The ocean carrier industry continues to face pressures from slowing global trade and demanding customers, while dealing with economic challenges such as currency shifts, oil price volatility and trade policy movement,” said Joachim Timm, director of global e-business at Hapag-Lloyd. “These elusive forms of risk and friction place an even greater emphasis on the need for value-added services in the ocean carrier industry to deliver efficiency and performance improvements that counter rising costs and spur growth. The Shipper Council fosters a community of competition and collaboration that generates new streams of operational excellence to benefit the entire industry. Hapag-Lloyd takes great pride in its leadership role within the shipping community and we are extremely pleased to be recognized by our customers.”

Shipper Council member companies all use GT Nexus as a common cloud technology platform to run their global supply chains. This allows the Shipper Council to measure and benchmark against the collective industry performance. Improvements by any single member benefit the entire community. The work of the group has moved the industry average data quality score to above 95 percent across the top 20 ocean carriers representing over 90 percent of global capacity.