Unfortunate, yet unsurprising. I always looked to Flexport to drive the logistics industry forward, but they are still limited by the extreme inefficiencies between ocean carriers, customs brokers, warehouses and truckers.
There’s no standardized data format that can be handed off at each step without human involvement. It would be optimal to have an algorithm handle the ocean freight, import clearance, and booking the warehouse and trucker to handle it from there.
Maersk took a shot at a standardized data system and called it quits due to limited support. But Maersk does have a platform offering realtime rates on container bookings on their own vessels, import clearance, and trucking through their platform. I believe other carriers like MSC and ONE-Line are following this approach to get their customers on board.
What’s promising is that if one major carrier does succeed with a standardized data process, they can more easily integrate it within the ocean carrier alliance that they are part of. The 3 major ocean carrier alliances control 83% of global capacity. This seems like a more straightforward way to take a stab at setting a standard for millions of containers moving worldwide. Large companies would plug in and to manage their supply chains using their logistics suite, and smaller companies would simply use the ocean carriers dashboards.
For now it appears that it’s still cheaper to hire from the worldwide supply of low paid logistics workers than it is to get everyone on a unified system.