How to reduce global shipping costs and speeds

The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on supply chains over the past year and has changed how we think about logistics. Businesses that have traditionally relied upon air freight found that rates soared at the height of the pandemic, pushing more to consider more cost-effective maritime shipping to overseas markets.

Around 11.1 billion tonnes were shipped by the maritime industry last year, despite the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. With supply chains being disrupted and becoming more complex, it has become more important to have a partner that understands your business’s needs. And this is where DP World’s SeaRates can help.

A one stop shop

Part of the DP World family since 2020, SeaRates has invested heavily in technology to bring cargo movement management online and make the shipping process more efficient and better value for customers.

Using SeaRates, you can follow your cargo at every step of its journey. For example, before it even sets off, the SeaRates Distances & Time tool can give you a detailed picture of your cargo’s journey and an estimate of how long it will take to reach its final destination. In addition, by aggregating rates from thousands of logistics providers and independent freight forwarders under the Digital Freight Alliance, the SeaRates Marketplace allows businesses to view available shipments by both cost and speed.

Meanwhile, the SeaRates Shipping Schedule tool can help make planning your cargo’s route much more straightforward, allowing you to check schedules by route, port, vessel, or carrier. Just by inputting the departure and arrival ports, the relevant date, and a transit time, a range of options can be generated that best suit your needs.

Things to consider

If you are deciding to go down the maritime route, container space is something that you will need to consider, as efficient packing of cargo can help save you money on transportation costs. SeaRates’ Load Calculator can help you get quotes instantly and compare shipping rates. The tool’s 3D simulation enables you to visualise your goods inside the transport unit and make their position optimal.

The Freight Calculator makes use of SeaRates’ proprietary algorithms and can also determine the estimated duration and distance for your shipments – whether it’s FCL shipping, LCL shipping, or Bulk – just by entering the place of origin, destination, and mode of transport. The tool will show the shortest distance between the two points, how long it will take, and how quickly it will travel, too, should you need to know.

Finally, the SeaRates Container Tracking tool can track cargo in real-time on any desktop or mobile device using data from the Automatic Identification System (AIS) to identify and locate ocean shipping objects through digital data exchange. And this allows SeaRates to determine the exact berthing time for you.

Going digital

At DP World, we are investing heavily to digitise supply chains and leveraging our worldwide infrastructure assets – including ports, terminals, and economic zones – to help us achieve this goal. We want our processes to be less paper-based and more digital: this will allow us to ship more containers around the world and help customers, freight forwarders, and ocean freight lines to move products anywhere. It won’t just benefit DP World. By digitising trade, we can help our partners and customers do greater volumes of business, more efficiently.

SeaRates is part of that vision. Since becoming part of the DP World family, SeaRates has been a key part of our efforts to bring customer operations online and cut through the administrative challenges associated with shipping.

We are continuing to develop our tools and resources so that goods reach customers quickly, wherever they are in the world, and in the most cost-efficient way possible. We understand that it’s a challenging operating environment right now, but we believe that by furthering our digital investments, our clients will benefit from better outcomes and more efficient trade.