Skip Navigation Links Please note: To view the design of this website, you need a browser that supports web standards. The content of this site is accessible (with no formatting) to most browsers. Upgrade to a Web standards compliant browser.

Expeditors Container Delivery Management™

Overview

Expeditors created Container Delivery Management™ (CDM™) to provide its customers with visibility to their container details, location and status. CDM™ is a web-based tool that allows carriers to input customer-defined milestones about specific containers.

The Challenge

Providing importers with visibility to a container's status is generally a surface carrier's responsibility as they have the most intimate knowledge of the container's location. In many cases, however, carriers are not equipped to provide their client with tracking of containers during delivery, nor do they have the ability to interface electronically with the customer's forwarder to provide complete container cycle time.

Another scenario is when one of a customer's carriers may be able to provide some spreadsheets or a web view that gives a customer visibility to a container's location or historical details, but the other truckers for the customer cannot provide this. Having more than one way of keeping track of containers is inefficient and could possibly lead to loss of visibility of some containers.

Lack of visibility to a container's status can lead to any of the following:

  • Storage fees assessed by the carrier due to late pick-up of the container
  • Demurrage charges assessed by the carrier due to late return of the container
  • Production disruptions or distribution shortages caused by lack of visibility to incoming containers, effectively creating a bottleneck in the supply chain

The Solution

Once the container milestones are input, the tool provides visibility to a customer about the status of their container. If Expeditors is handling a customer's freight, exp.o® can run complete cycle-time reporting on a container level basis. Otherwise, destination container management reports can be run directly from the CDM™ website or through exp.o®. CDM™ can also help identify where performance issues exist with regards to a carrier's on-time pick-up or delivery of containers.

Additionally, multiple carriers can log onto CDM™ to input container milestones so that all of the container status information is in one central location, easily accessible by the customer.

Features

Features and Benefits of Container Delivery Management™ include the following:

  • 24/7/365 online availability for adding container details.
  • Central location for all container details — multiple surface carriers use the same application
  • Customer-defined delivery milestones — customers can define the milestones that they feel are most important to be measured
  • Customer-defined reports — an example could include a metric report that measures the amount of time between pick-up and delivery of containers
  • Automated e-mail alerts available on a customer-defined basis — an example could include an e-mail sent to the carriers and customer 2 days before free time is going to expire