UPDATED 09:13 EDT / AUGUST 10 2018

EMERGING TECH

IBM and Maersk launch TradeLens blockchain shipping platform to lower costs and ship faster

Computing giant IBM Corp. and global shipping company A.P. Moller-Maersk Group announced Thursday the official launch of TradeLens, a distributed ledger blockchain platform for tracking shipments and managing supply chains jointly developed by the two companies.

This follows an announcement by the two companies about the collaborative project in January, which started as a trial in March of last year. Since then, more than 94 organizations have become actively involved or agreed to participate in TradeLens and the platform has captured more than 154 million shipping events.

“We believe blockchain can play an important role in digitizing global shipping, an area of the global economy that moves $4 trillion of goods every year,” said Bridget van Kralingen, senior vice president of IBM Global Industries, Solutions and Blockchain. “However, success with the technology rests on a single factor — bringing the entire ecosystem together around a common approach that benefits all participants equally.”

TradeLens uses blockchain technology based on IBM’s Hyperledger Fabric and acts as the foundation for supply chain tracking by allowing multiple trading partners to share a single distributed ledger and automatically acknowledge every shipping event in a secure fashion.

As the ledger is shared, it means that the entire supply chain has a single, trusted view of the entire shipment process. Using blockchain technology, it is also possible to enable privacy controls that allow the broadcast of a shipment event without revealing internal details or violating confidentiality while still providing an auditable history and sequence of events.

Using this technology TradeLens connects shippers, shipping lines, freight forwarders, port and terminal operators, inland transportation and customs authorities so that they can interact more efficiently through real-time shipping data and documents. The platform does this not just with manual scanning by humans or machines but also “internet of things and sensor data including temperature control and container weight.

Of those 154 million shipping events captured by TradeLens since the beginning of its trial, the system can record data such as the arrival times of vessels and container “gate-in” and documents such as customs releases, commercial invoices and bills of landing.

According to IBM, the amount of data flowing through the TradeLens platform is growing at a rate of 1 million events per day.

“TradeLens uses blockchain technology to create an industry standard for the secure digitization and transmission of supply chain documents around the world,” said Peter Levesque, chief executive of Modern Terminals Ltd. “This initiative will generate tremendous savings for our industry over time while enhancing global supply chain security.”

Mike White, TradeLens leader for Maersk, said he believes the joint collaboration between the two companies will be fundamental to helping form standards that can be rapidly adopted by the global shipping industry, which is notoriously large, complex and increasingly collapsed into individual silos that do not communicate well.

“Our joint collaboration model allows us to better address key feedback from ecosystem participants while ensuring TradeLens interoperability and data protection among Maersk, IBM and all ecosystem participants,” said Mike White.

More than $16 trillion in goods are shipped each year and 80 percent of the things people use every day arrive by ship. In order to best serve the industry, the TradeLens trial identified opportunities to prevent delays caused by documentation errors, improve communication and remove other impediments. IBM and Maersk claimed this represents $1.8 trillion in untapped potential that could be explored by streamlining efficiency, lowering errors and reducing fraud.

In one case study, TradeLens reduced the transit time of a shipment of packaging materials to a production line in the United States by 40 percent, thus saving thousands of dollars in cost and lost time.

Standards discussions to adopt these methods, the blockchain platform and underlying processes are actively underway with standards body Openshipping.org and the companies involved are working to align the platform’s application programming interfaces with standards set forth by the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business.

The TradeLens solution is available today through an early adopter program and is expected to be fully commercially available by the end of this year.

Image: Pixabay

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