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St. Louis Based Tech Firm Partners With Port Of Long Beach to Create a Supply Chain Information Highway

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Global Logistics, Global Trade Daily, News, Ocean Ports

St. Louis Based Tech Firm Partners With Port Of Long Beach to Create a Supply Chain Information Highway

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New technology that provides shippers the ability to access, analyze, and integrate data regarding the movement of freight through the nation’s largest ports and helps improve in-transit visibility was highlighted on opening day of FreightWeekSTL 2023. The week-long freight and logistics expo presented by the St. Louis Regional Freightway kicked off with Innovation Day featuring emerging technologies aimed at enhancing global freight movement. This included a spotlight on St. Louis-based technology consulting firm UNCOMN, and its partnership with the Port of Long Beach, highlighting their efforts to establish a Supply Chain Information Highway and the role it can play in improving the movement of freight in ports throughout the country.

The FreightWeek panel discussion featured Jason Carter, Founder and CEO of UNCOMN, and Noel Hacegaba, Deputy Executive Director/COO of the Port of Long Beach, which is the second busiest port in America. Hacegaba said virtually every container that crosses the Port of Long Beach docks on a given day breaches all 435 congressional districts, so the cargo that moves through the port complex truly is of national significance.

The partnership between the two organizations began in 2021, when the Port of Long Beach was seeking a prototype to give shippers the ability to track and trace containers and shipments along all aspects of the supply chain. Hacegaba said more than 9 million container units move through his port in any given year, continuing their journey by truck or rail, and cited how the lack of visibility and the inability to track and trace those containers with a high degree of certainty is very disruptive to the supply chain. He and Carter believe it is the number one problem preventing the beneficial cargo owners from achieving optimum supply chain efficiency.

Carter said the prototype was delivered to the Port of Long Beach in early 2022 in time for the Transpacific Maritime (TPM) Conference, where it showed the art of the possible and gained a lot of visibility and interest, paving the way to advance from the prototype to phase two, where operations and real data are needed.

Fortunately, that was where his experience and background became a valuable tool as the company focused on the data sharing agreements necessary to build trust in the Supply Chain Information Highway.

Hacegaba said his customers had been waiting years for a solution that would enable them to have true end-to-end visibility and that need for visibility across the supply chain was magnified through the pandemic and the related supply chain crisis.

To that end, in December 2022, Hacegaba and Carter convened a meeting in St. Louis, bringing together the leadership of several partner ports to educate them about the Supply Chain Information Highway and engage them in the initiative. Hosted by the St. Louis Regional Freightway, the participants included representatives from the Port of Oakland (Calif.), the Northwest Seaport Alliance, the Utah Inland Port Authority, South Carolina Ports Authority, Port of Miami (Fla.), the Port of New York and New Jersey, and Port Hueneme.

He added that, looking to the next phase, they are planning to extend the initiative beyond the initial group of 10 BCOs. By this fall, they hope to be extending it to other stakeholders, including trucking companies, 3PLs, the railroads, cargo carriers and others who also need visibility of goods flowing through the supply chain. He said a primary objective is to design resilience into the supply chain in anticipation of any future disruptions.

The FreightWeekSTL 2023 panel session was moderated by Mary Lamie, Executive Vice President of Multi Modal Enterprises for Bi-State Development, which operates the St. Louis Regional Freightway as one of its enterprises.

To review the full panel session, visit www.FreightWeekSTL.com.

FreightWeekSTL 2023 continues through May 26 and will feature virtual panel sessions with industry experts and leaders in freight, logistics and transportation. The week-long freight and logistics expo is being delivered by the St. Louis Regional Freightway and Bi-State Development. To learn more or to register for the remaining panel sessions or view past sessions for FreightWeekSTL 2023, visit www.freightweekstl.com.

demurrage The Port Authority of Valencia (PAV) has approved the concession of a space in the Port of Sagunto to ZELEROS to carry out a pilot for its hyperloop transport system.
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Shippers Paid More Than $114M in Demurrage Fees in Feb and March 2022

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National demurrage fees continue to climb as shippers search for capacity

Dray Alliance today released an outlook for April based on the activity within its container trucking platform from Feb-March 2022. Dray Alliance findings reflect the impact of the continued port disruptions and demurrage fees being incurred by shippers with containers sitting at the ports.

The demurrage issue has become a financial burden to those who have containers sitting at ports, particularly the Port of Los Angeles. Detention and demurrage penalties have soared since the start of the pandemic and as further supply chain disruptions have hit. According to Dray Alliance, drayage carriers have been turned away from picking up loaded imported containers because of unpaid demurrage charges — a major contributor to delays and slowdowns.

“Containers keep sitting at ports, and demurrage fees keep tallying up, not by choice but by the difficulty of how to retrieve them. This has caused a financial burden to all of those in the industry,” said Steve Wen, Co-Founder, and CEO, Dray Alliance. “In our experience working with the Port of Los Angeles, we have seen how data confirms the penalties being paid due to demurrage fees. These, added to the lack of truckers and ways to distribute cargo, are a continued contributor to port backlogs.”

A Forbes article cited The American Trucking Association, who reported that this sector is headed for a shortage of 160,000 drivers by 2030. Additionally they estimate the need for one million new drivers over the next 10 years. While container volume has increased to record highs, truck driver capacity has not matched the growth, resulting in appointment slots remaining finite, leading to an increase in demurrage penalties. As the March data shows, for all of the containers currently discharged at the Port of Los Angeles, 41% are incurring demurrage, meaning a total of 25,258 out of the 61,944 shipments are past due over five days after discharge.

“The carriers view these penalties – whether right or wrong – as a profitable part of their business,” said Brian Glick, CEO and founder of Chain.io, a systems integration platform that works closely with shippers and freight forwarders.

“So even if the Ocean Shipping Reform Act passes, they’ll become compliant with the law, but won’t work against their own self-interest. They’re a for-profit entity, and it’s hard to envision them willingly sacrificing a profitable part of their business for what’s perceived to be a moving target of playing fair,” he added, in a recent Supply Chain Management Review article.

Dray Alliance data from February 2022:

  • Average time from discharge to outgate was 5.8 days. Assuming four free days at the terminal, that’s 1.8 days of demurrage per shipment on average.

  • Depending on the terminal, the charges for one day of demurrage are anywhere from $175-$225/day; which escalated over time and equaled an average of $168.75 per day

  • During this month, the Port of Los Angeles moved 424,072.85 TEUs of loaded imports (212,036 feet).

  • Using this metric as the total number of containers, shippers paid $71.56M in demurrage fees through POLA in February 2022.

Dray Alliance data from March 2022:

  • Average time for discharge was 4.9 days, assuming four free days at the terminal, that’s 0.9 days of demurrage per shipment on average.

  • Utilizing a daily demurrage rate of $187.50, the average March shipment through the Port of Los Angeles incurred an additional $337.50 worth of demurrage.

  • In March, the Port of Los Angeles moved 509,953 TEUs of loaded imports (254,977 FEUs).

  • Using FEU’ s as the total number of containers, shippers paid $43.03M in demurrage fees through POLA in March 2022.

Headquartered near the Port of Long Beach, the Dray Alliance platform provides complete container management, including automated status notifications, real-time GPS tracking and document management and analytics for every container. In December 2021, Dray Alliance completed a $40M Series B round led by global venture capital group Headline.

About Dray Alliance

Dray Alliance is a venture-backed startup that is focused on building a container trucking platform to deliver shipping containers from ports to warehouses. Its technology connects container shippers with a network of vetted truck drivers through a mobile app. By leveraging API integrations with the ports and data from the mobile app, Dray Alliance’s platform allows container shippers to manage and track all container deliveries in a single web portal and make truckers more efficient. The company has raised a total of $55M in venture capital and working capital financing, and is already working with over one hundred enterprise customers, delivering thousands of containers a month. Steve Wen is the Co-founder and CEO of Dray Alliance, and was named to Forbes’ 2022 30 under 30 list. Please visit drayalliance.com for more information.