Supply Ecosystem Integrations that are Powering Flexport Platform to Make Global Trade Easy
Since their introduction in 1956, containers have been the backbone of global trade. Over 65 million shipping containers are in circulation, transporting over 90% of traded goods and enabling global commerce. However, even as mass adoption of containers has driven down shipping costs and transformed global supply chains, the underlying processes and systems have largely remained manual, paper-based, and inefficient.
Flexport is reducing this complexity and making global trade easy for everyone by building a platform that stitches together various entities involved in the complex movement of goods. Through the Flexport platform, customers can manage their end-to-end supply chain, track their freight status, and collaborate in real-time.
The Supply Ecosystem team is powering the Flexport platform by building direct integrations with carriers, logistics providers, customs brokers, and other related entities in the global logistics to make information exchange secure, efficient, and timely.
Automating the exchange of documents with ocean carriers
Flexport works with leading ocean carriers to move shipments for its clients. To reserve space on a vessel previously, operators had to do it outside our platform by visiting the carrier’s website resulting in significant inefficiencies and increased time.
The Supply Ecosystem team addresses these issues by building direct integrations between the Flexport platform and the booking portal of ocean carriers. Now Flexport operators can transmit booking information (origin, destination, container type, schedules, and itineraries) directly from the platform. They can see the booking status as soon as the carrier sends back a confirmation and take appropriate action.
In addition to booking, the Supply Ecosystem team has also automated submitting mandatory documents such as Shipping Instructions (SI) and Verified Gross Mass (VGM) from the Flexport platform. The ability to place bookings and transmit documents directly from the platform has improved operator efficiency, eliminated data entry errors, and provided better customer service.
As booking is the critical first step in the shipment lifecycle, incorrect data captured during this phase can result in downstream inefficiencies and rework. For example, an incorrect booking could generate an inaccurate invoice, create routing issues and result in a wrong customs filing. Automating this process has reduced the risk of data entry errors and potential rework.
The Supply Ecosystem team is in the process of productizing direct carrier integrations by building an Application Programming Interface (API) for Flexport partners. These APIs will enable them to book across various carriers through one single integration, significantly improving their operational efficiency.
Getting container spot rates in real-time
With the recent capacity crunch, high demand for space, and surge in shipping rates, many carriers are moving away from long-term contracts to more profitable short-term rates. Multiple carriers have developed and rolled out spot rates API, and others are closely following the suit. Using these APIs, customers can instantly access rates and even receive a load guarantee. Real-time access to spot rates and bookings is crucial in this market where rates are high, and demand far outstrips supply.
The Supply Ecosystem team at Flexport has built direct integrations with multiple ocean carriers to get instant access to spot rates and make them available to operators, who can then choose to book if the rates are within the acceptable range.
Providing real-time access to these rates has improved our speed-to-quote and unlocked additional capacity in this tight market. Automating spot rate access has also reduced the administrative burden for operators as they do not have to visit carriers’ websites to check for rates continuously.
The Supply Ecosystem team is also building an intuitive user interface to automate the end-to-end quote and booking process. Once complete, Flexport operators and customers can quote and book directly from the platform.
Automating information exchange with airline carriers
Customers prefer to ship goods via air for time-sensitive, expensive, and perishable cargo. In recent years, they have shown increased interest in air freight because of exponentially high prices for ocean freight, tight backlogs, and space crunch.
Throughout the lifecycle of an air shipment, Flexport exchanges multiple documents with the airlines needed for air freight shipping. The Supply Ecosystem team is building integrations between the Flexport platform and air carriers to automate the exchange of these documents to improve operational efficiency, reduce costs, and reduce manual errors due to manual entry.
The Supply Ecosystem team has built direct integration with a third-party platform to transmit house and air waybill, a document that contains detailed shipment information, electronically to the airlines. Operators can transmit waybills to 100+ airlines directly from the Flexport platform and see the confirmation results.
Electronically transmitting waybills has saved us thousands of dollars in the fees airlines charge to enter the waybill information into their system manually. It has also reduced exceptions because of improved data accuracy and completeness, reduced wait time during the physical acceptance of shipments, and improved operational efficiency. We have also built a direct integration with a leading provider of rates data for the air industry. Through this interface, Flexport pricing analysts can access rates for multiple airlines and routes, all in one place.
The Supply Ecosystem team will continue to work on digitizing the information exchange with the airlines including rates, space availability, booking, and invoicing. Our goal is to significantly improve operator efficiency by enabling them to manage the entire shipment lifecycle from the Flexport platform and eliminate any need to go to any external portal.
Automating information exchange with the trucking carriers
Flexport contracts with multiple trucking carriers at the origin and destination to move goods on the ground. Through this network of truckers, Flexport is able to stitch different modes of transportation (ocean and air with truck) together and provide a seamless door-to-door service to our clients. We partner with three different types of truckers: drayage truckers pick and drop containers from port or rail ramps, cartage truckers pick and deliver within a local area, and full truckload (FTL) truckers move domestic shipments between warehouses.
Our operators send delivery orders (DO) to truckers to move ground shipments for our customers. These DOs serve multiple purposes. They contain cargo information, authorize the terminal to release the cargo, and provide detailed delivery instructions about the final delivery of the shipment. Once a trucker receives the DO, they reply back confirming if they can or can’t move the shipment.
The Supply Ecosystem team has built direct integrations between Flexport Platform and trucker transportation management systems (TMS). Through these integrations, operators can send the delivery orders to the truckers. As truckers reject or accept these requests, operators can see the response on the Flexport Platform and take appropriate action. Through this integration, truckers can also send the milestone information while the shipment is in transit and the final proof of delivery once the shipment is delivered to its destination.
In addition to improving our operational efficiency, trucking carriers have also benefited from automation. Before integration, they received DOs via email, which they would then manually enter into their TMS. With automation, this data is automatically populated into their system, resulting in significant cost and time savings.
Integrating with our worldwide network of warehouses
Flexport manages a worldwide network of warehouses to provide distribution and fulfillment solutions for its clients. Flexport owns some of these warehouses in strategic locations, and for others, it partners or subcontracts with third-party warehouse providers. These warehouses enable Flexport to consolidate, de-consolidate, label, and route air and LCL freight at both origin and destination.
These warehouses are managed using different warehouse management systems (WMS), including Flexport’s warehouse management system. To keep the third-party WMS and the Flexport platform in sync, our operators have to enter the cargo-related information (weights, dimensions, pallet count, etc.) twice, once in the third-party WMS and then the same information in the Flexport platform. This double-entry results in significant manual effort, and a lack of real-time visibility.
The Supply Ecosystem team plans to build a seamless integration between the third-party WMS used by Flexport’s network of partners and our global trade platform. This integration will eliminate the inefficiencies from the manual effort required to keep both systems in sync.
Real-time access to cargo status and details, including weights and dimensions, will significantly improve Flexport’s planning effectiveness as the cargo awaits consolidation and deconsolidation in our warehouses. For example, suppose a Flexport client wants to re-route a single pallet from an in-transit shipment awaiting consolidation. In that case, they can do so efficiently because of real-time access to cargo status.
Compliance screening of global entities involved in business transactions with Flexport
Governments and regulatory bodies worldwide maintain a list of entities that are restricted from conducting business. To minimize this risk of working with those companies and individuals, the Supply Ecosystem team has built direct integration with a third-party screening provider. Through this integration, we can now screen against the majority of global watchlists and sanction lists in their respective countries to ensure we don’t facilitate trade with any entity that appears on these lists.
As soon as an entity is added to the Flexport platform, the integration sends the entity information to our screening solution provider. The provider then conducts a comprehensive screening against the relevant regulatory lists across the globe and returns the results. If there is a hit — i.e., if the screened entity is found on a regulatory list — we flag this shipment and send it to an exceptions queue. The compliance team then reviews the queue and takes appropriate action per the standard operating procedure.
The regulatory status of both business and individual entities is dynamic, i.e., entities often move from denied to the approved list and vice-versa. To have the most up-to-date regulatory status of these entities, the Supply Ecosystem team conducts ongoing monitoring of all the entities that do business with Flexport.
We often get a false positive — i.e., entities are returned as a hit when in reality, they are clean, and we can engage with them without compliance risk. In such cases, once our compliance team marks this entity as “clean,” our integration will call the provider API and add the entity to an allowlist.
Automating the ingestion of market intelligence data
Flexport is a data-driven company, and we use data from various sources to make critical business decisions. For example, we use data to price services for our customers, make informed routing decisions and improve our operational efficiency. We also use market data to forecast demand, build better products, and conduct our long-term strategic planning. The Supply Ecosystem has built multiple integrations to get the market intelligence data, structure and standardize it, and make it available to our planning and operations teams.
The Supply Ecosystem team has integrated with an independent provider of air freight data to get access to global freight prices and historical charges to provide competitive pricing to our customers.
We are also working with a provider of market share data for air and ocean freight. This data would help us better understand the air cargo volumes for multiple cargo categories. The ability to understand the current and forecasted capacity across various trade lanes will be an invaluable input in building Flexport’s long-term air strategy. As Flexport grows and expands into new markets, this data will help our teams make better strategic decisions.
Having timely and accurate market intelligence data in a centralized place has significantly reduced the administrative burden on Flexport’s pricing and analytics teams. The team can now focus on more value-added work instead of spending time pulling this data and aggregating it.
Integrating with sources of track and trace data
Our vision is to build a platform that will provide industry-leading end-to-end supply chain visibility and traceability. The Supply Ecosystem team is helping achieve this vision by bringing track and trace data from various sources. By unifying and enriching this data and building machine learning models at scale, Flexport will be able to provide accurate and timely visibility to our customers and internal operations.
The Supply Ecosystem team has built integrations with ocean carriers, ports, terminals, rail companies, truckers, and air carriers to get data directly from the source. We receive real-time updates from the ocean carriers about critical events such as expected and actual times for container loading and discharge. Similarly, for inland moves, we receive key milestones such as pick-up and delivery, empty container return, and proof of delivery from drayage and cartage truckers.
We have built direct integrations with multiple airlines to pull key terminal milestones such as departed, arrived, manifested, ready for pick-up, and delivered milestones. As air carriers are technically more advanced, most of them provide APIs to transfer and share milestone data with minimal latency.
Getting real-time in-transit visibility has significantly reduced our cost to serve, improved our ability to adjust shipments, and helped us serve our customers better. For example, through visibility into a delayed shipment, our operators can effectively plan downstream events such as when to send the drayage truckers to the port to pick up the containers, prepare the warehouse as per the new schedule to receive the shipment, and inform our customers to plan for the potential delays.
View to the future
In the global supply chain and logistics, the flow of information facilitates the flow of goods. To that end, the Supply Ecosystem at Flexport will continue to build integrations with all the key players in global trade and make information exchange easy.
Our goal is to iterate and improve our design, technology, and processes to achieve the speed and scale required to integrate with thousands of entities participating in global trade. We will continue to invest in tools, technologies, and processes to make it faster and easier for everyone to integrate with the Flexport platform. For example, we are building an intuitive user interface so Flexport partners and customers can quickly and easily integrate with us without needing any engineering support.
We will continue to build actionable metrics and dashboards to monitor the health and impact of each of our integrations. We will also use these metrics to evaluate the business impact of these integrations and prioritize what matters most, gather insights into how to improve our integrations, and proactively resolve issues.
As containerization transformed global trade by significantly reducing the cost of moving goods, documentation standards have the potential to significantly reduce the costs of information exchange. To make that possible, we will engage with standards bodies and industry forums to build new data exchange and security standards.
Data is at the core of everything we do, our decisions, processes, and innovation are data-driven. The Supply Ecosystem will keep acquiring data and connecting all parties in the global trade ecosystem and make global trade easy for everyone!
For an overview of how the broader ecosystem team is changing global trade, click here.
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Join us to help build the future of global trade?
We are looking for exceptional people to join our growing team. If you enjoy working on complex problems that have the potential for a significant world impact, you might find the challenge you are looking for in the ecosystem team at Flexport.
Notes: Thanks to Nitin Goel, Prabhdeep Gill, Dylan Irbeck, Kathryn Boswell, Vinod Kumar, Brian Astrup, and Manuel Venegas for reading drafts of this document and suggesting changes.
