CIFFA 2024 Fall Forwarder

20 THE FORWARDER | FALL 2024 In July 2024, CIFFA participated in a study commissioned by Transport Canada on data and digitalization in supply chain operations. The study looked at the trust framework and usage required for a data sharing solution, or current supply chain challenges and opportunities that would be relevant for a future national digital supply chain solution. Transport Canada has acquired the services of Deloitte to develop recommendations on the data architecture and standards, governance (including a trust framework), and security of a national digital supply chain solution for cargo movements throughout Canada. According to Transport Canada, “learning about needs, desires, and existing and planned systems at the local and regional levels across the country—and how a national solution could be designed to build on and connect with these—will be an important outreach objective and determinant of success.” Work is being continued to increase digitalization of the supply chain. Challenges to this include fragmented data systems, a lack of standardized communication, vulnerabilities to disruptions, and limited visibility into the entire supply chain path. CIFFA invited members of its Technology Committee to discuss the issues and provide suggestions for consideration. Here is a summary of the discussion. In considering a digital infrastructure solution, scalability will be important. Nuts and bolts standardization and the ability to provide upgrades to legacy systems is another aspect. Even if everyone agreed on a standard, many participants have back-end systems that don’t support certain things. This is a hard problem to solve, and there are a lot of aggregators that come in to fill in those gaps. If participants don’t have an API yet, aggregators can come in and scrape the data, but it adds significant costs. Another thing to consider is that a lot of the supply chain participants are competitors, who want to share data but don’t want to give away their competitive advantage. A lot of members are relatively small organizations, and cost is also a factor to them. While visibility is a key factor, in terms of knowing where a shipment is, there is also a need for some predictive capabilities, and ability to forecast around events. Providing the mandated data to comply with authorities is one thing. To provide data assets to industry, most forwarders will look at the business benefits they can get out of the program, to see if there is an aggregate benefit. Forwarders that can provide greater visibility can provide better rates, and some have quite good visibility data. Data quality is also a problem regarding parsing the good data, and not being required to share the data more than once to different departments. The U.S. FLOW program, wherein there is a sharing of purchase orders, was cited as an example of where the buyer and seller have good PO data, but the forwarder has fragmented access to this. Maybe the data can be manually extracted, but may provide a warped view. But anything going to Customs is mandated to be accurate to avoid potential compliance programs. According to comments from the Technology committee members who were queried: • “Sometimes we pull info from an API and the ocean carrier data is wrong, especially when there are transshipment points. The latency is definitely an issue. For example on container discharge dates-sometimes it’s 24 hours later. There are also inefficiencies with last mile deliveries,” he said. • “If every carrier offered an API that worked the same way we could pull data. Now we have to pay people, and this adds $2-5 dollars per container of waste to get the data. Aggregators are scraping websites, sending old EDI messages when they have to. • A lot of forwarders operate in an open network, with 3rd party systems trying to access data. E manifest is still accepting older data (ACI from foreign freight forwarders) to get into the country, leading to penalties. There are issues with correcting that. • “Semantic differences are really a major part of this waste. When they say a container is “arrived” it doesn’t necessarily mean “berthed”. Transport Canada held a subsequent meeting in September 2024 for supply chain stakeholders and will revert on the progress it is making with its initiatives at a later date. A Discussion on Digital Infrastructure