[cwarner]

We are developing our processes to do electronic booking with the Ocean Lines using OTM and EDI. We’re not sure how best to deal with schedules from the Lines and we are wondering how others are addressing this. It seems to us that we could do one of the following,

• enter lines schedules into a system and use that as the basis for voyage selection
• via EDI accept available voyages from a line for a specific shipment about to be booked
• manually, view line websites or other material

Any suggestions, advice, or experience in this area would be greatly appreciated.

Caleb

[rvhaaster]

Hi Caleb,

I've been working on a project where we decided to not use the schedules in OTM. First of all they were not supported by the portal we were using (INTTRA) which meant we had to go direct with the shipping lines.
Next challenge would be that the voyage schedules are on a service basis (i.e. CMA-CGM's PEX2 - Pacific Express Caribbean Service) which means that you may have to connect multiple voyages from different services to get from your PoL to PoD (meaning that you will have to tranship). And the rates my client had agreed were from PoL to PoD, resulting in an inconsistency between rate record & rate service in case of transhipments; OTM up to 5.5.05 cannot cover multiple rate services for a single rate record.
We have 'solved' this by using lookup rate service with the contracted service time for each lane/carrier, knowing that you will get the latest scheduled sail date (and possibly the PoD ETA) in your booking conf.

FYI: In 6.0 a feature called TIRSAT will be delivered which allows for some more functionality with transhipments in Ocean shipping.

Hope this gives you some more input, although it's not the answer to your question.

[cwarner]

We are going direct with the shipping lines, rather than using the portals, but it would be difficult to use their schedules if they are arranged like that. Thanks.

[Mattias J]

Hi Caleb,

I would not recommend that you go ahead and integrate ocean vessel schedules into OTM before 6.0 is released. Not sure how many transhipments you have on your shipments, but if there are 1 or more you will probably face problems trying to replicate this in your shipments. Since the shippinglines will send you the schedules by services you will have to try to plan the transhipment into the shipment as a stop. Otherwise you will face hard times trying to combine diffrent services into your whole ocean transport.

In 6.0 there are some enhancements to try to plan with the transhipments, however it remains to be seen how that would be able to work for you and also us.

Let me know if you want an example on how a EDIFACT message of schedules look like and I can send it over to you.

Cheers
/Mattias