NileDutch, the West Africa boxline specialist, believes it has taken a big step forward to resolve one of the one of the biggest headaches facing liners, namely empty container handling and relocation.
NileDutch has teamed up predictive logistics startup Transmetrics in a bid to streamline empty container flows.
With the start of the cooperation, Transmetrics will also launch its new product AssetMetrics. AssetMetrics uses historical data of the shipping company and improves those data sets to the extent that the intelligent algorithm can produce reliable predictions. With its technology, Transmetrics claims it has been able to achieve from 25% to 50% higher forecast accuracy than the in-house teams of their customers. This approach allows the rebalancing of assets across the whole NileDutch network at minimal cost. It takes into account maintenance costs, the future demand at each location, the cost to reposition and the assets that will be returned. AssetMetrics will be connected to the TMS-system of NileDutch to secure a constant exchange of information.
“With machine learning and intelligent algorithms we now want to revolutionise how empty container handling and relocation is organised. Our envisioned goal for the project with NileDutch is to reduce the cost of empty container logistics by 10-15%,” said Anna Shaposhnikova, CCO and co-founder of Transmetrics.
“We had been looking for a partner who could help us streamline our empty container flows for a long time. There are different IT solutions on the market, but we chose Transmetrics over other providers because they proved their technical expertise and also demonstrated a deep knowledge of the logistics industry and container shipping in particular, which is very difficult to find,” said Carlo Zaalberg, global director of logistics at NileDutch. Smart empty container repositioning is one of the areas where NileDutch is seeing a large potential for improvement by predictive analytics and artificial intelligence.
