Soren Skou has revealed his next step in making his company shipping’s answer to FedEx. A.P. Moller – Maersk today unveiled Maersk Flow, a digital supply chain management platform which the Danish container shipping giant claims gives customers everything they need to take control of their supply chain, from factory to market.
Maersk Flow enables transparency in critical supply chain processes and ensures that the flow of goods and documents is executed as planned. It also reduces manual work and costly mistakes, while empowering logistics professionals with all the current and historical data they need to sustainably improve their supply chain.
“The daily life of small and medium sized businesses is increasingly global, complex and fast-paced,” Maersk explained in a release. “Every day thousands of products are moving through the supply chain, on multiple carriers, coming from and reaching many supply chain partners and customers. And for many of these companies this complexity is managed fully manually via spreadsheets, emails and phone calls, which despite lots of hard work is leading to reduced visibility and control – and ultimately higher costs or lost sales. With Maersk Flow these companies will be able to take control of their supply chains.”
Since taking over from Nils Andersen as the head of Denmark’s largest shipping company four years ago, Skou has set his sights on making Maersk a global integrator of container logistics, keen to link up and integrate various strands of Maersk businesses to be more like UPS and FedEx with better cross selling of services to customers.
It would be very wrong of me to criticise Big Blue, but one gets the impression that APM run this sort of Press release every three years. They have been doing so for thirty years and more by now. Thirty years ago they called it The Visible Pipeline, and they have been Integrating The Supply Chain and making it Transparent for so long that the poor Pipeline must soon be made entirely of seamless Schedule 80 glass, and will be Invisible again.