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INTTRA leverages Enterprise Mashups to Integrate the World's Global Ocean Shipping Data for Logistics Management
Organization Profile
INTTRA, founded in 2000 and headquartered in Parsippany, N.J., is a leading global provider of e-commerce solutions to ocean carriers and their customers. INTTRA professionals work with customers to streamline and standardize their shipping processes, applying their e-commerce knowledge of the shipping industry for customers in markets worldwide.
INTTRA's e-commerce platform offers a comprehensive range of e-commerce tools, including: Tender, Sailing Schedules, Booking, Shipping Instructions, Bill of Lading, Track & Trace, and Reports. Accessing the INTTRA platform is simple, using any combination of their channel solutions: INTTRA-Link (EDI-based, system-to-system connection), INTTRA-Desktop (off-line PC application), or INTTRA-Act (web-based application). INTTRA's carrier network includes, Alianca, ANL, CMA CGM, CSAV, CSAV NORASIA, Delmas, DAL, Deutsche Afrika-Linien, Hamburg Sud, Hanjin, Hapag-Lloyd, "K" Line, Libra, Maersk Line, MCC Transport Pte Ltd., MISC, Mitsui O.S.K. Lines, MSC Mediterranean Shipping Company S.A., NYK Line, Safmarine, United Arab Shipping Company and Zim. The INTTRA carrier network represents approximately 80% of the container capacity among the world's top ocean carriers.
The Challenge
The Parsippany, N.J. based firm works with shipping interests across the globe. It works with companies in countries that have booming trade and a fully developed e-commerce infrastructure to support those businesses as well as with companies in less developed nations where the trade support infrastructure is still evolving and in its nascent stages.
INTTRA's vision is to provide a global industry network offering shippers, carriers and supply chain software providers the choice of connecting to all shipping partners using open standards based connections. But further growth of the network depended on expanding into new markets and offering additional products and services.
"We realized that creating products and services that integrated data from different sources across the industry was one of the best ways for us to add value for the users of the network. Now we faced the challenges and opportunities associated with how we could consolidate data and deliver it to users in a way they wanted", explains Jeffrey Pattison, INTTRA CIO.
INTTRA discovered that one of the major desires of the shipping community was the consolidation of real-time – or at least near real-time – sailing schedules. So INTTRA developed a site, called OceanSchedules.com, to take data feeds from more than 35 carriers on a weekly or daily basis.
The site initially adopted an ad-supported business model, which has done well. However, INTTRA wanted to respond to interest by shippers, freight-forwarders and carriers interested in white labeling the e-commerce-provider's technologies. To address this demand, the site had to add new – much more comprehensive – information publishing requirements; shipping industry customers are progressing to the point where they need more real time information.
Among the many data-related problems that INTTRA encountered was the fact that no two organizations internally maintain shipping data in the same way. While many shippers and freight-forwarders keep fairly regular schedules, others change frequently to attempt to better match supply and demand. Though many companies were indeed digitizing their records – moving from paper documents to electronic formats – shipping schedules were still incomplete or outdated soon after they became available.
"Simply consolidating and digitizing the data was not enough. There was a requirement to maintain a dynamic and current record of schedules. Schedules were often stale before the data was posted due to demand changes, severe weather or other factors that caused changes in departures or in vessel cut-off times," says Pattison.
The JackBe Solution
A number of options existed to address INTTRA's information publishing issues. A partial solution would have been for INTTRA to aggregate all the feeds on a daily basis using traditional EDI technology. However, even if schedules were updated on a daily basis, the information would be dated. This is not viable in an environment where important changes can occur at any time and have critical impact on the business.
An example is vessel "cut-off" times. Cutoff information is the information of the number of days or hours prior to the vessel departure till when loaded containers can be accepted at the place of receipt. These cut off dates are imposed due to operational reasons.
"Knowing the status of vessel cut-off times, which can change at any moment, is important to this industry," he says.
This status is influenced by information critical to trade – such as weather data, port congestion data and other information critical to scheduling. If the data came in all the same format, it would have been viable for INTTRA to develop such a capability in-house. But there were dozens of formats used by different players in the industry to maintain and publish this information.
Given the wide array of disparate information sources, the simpler solution was to find a technology that could bring together all of information that existed in native formats and bring it together to offer it on the INTTRA portal in real- or near-real-time.
"We needed to have a data mashup – or a Web service – that got data in real time. We needed a data mash-up tool that made it possible to treat all the data sources the same," Pattison says.
INTTRA worked on the challenge with JackBe, a Chevy Chase, MD-based technology company, to use its enterprise mashup platform, Presto, to integrate the disparate systems and data sources so that the organization could quickly create new capabilities by leveraging existing technological environments.
"We also used JackBe to provide our application with seamless access to the batch data that came in via the traditional EDI channels as well as the more dynamic data that is accessible in real-time via web services that come directly from our carriers," he explains.
Consequently INTTRA is now able to capture data calls from shipping schedules via web service capabilities and a desktop widget. This is in turn enables the consortium to work with shippers that might not be able to handle large traditional EDI data volumes.
Handling Bumps in the Road:
The implementation, according to Pattison provided some valuable lessons on how to manage a mashup deployment:
- Be patient…expect a shakeout period, as with any new technology implementation.
- Implement a portion of the solution to learn how to better implement the remainder of the solution.
- Don't underestimate the time and effort needed to make the required knowledge transfers.
- Partner with a vendor that will follow through on meeting the company's needs.
"JackBe did that," says Pattison. "We had some issues – largely driven by the scope of the challenge, and the fact that we were deploying the project in the middle of a huge economic event. But JackBe brought the people we needed onsite to help us address the issues."
For More Information
More information about JackBe Enterprise Mashup Platform, Presto®, can be found at http://www.jackbe.com/products/index.php.
Additional Case Studies of JackBe customers can be found at http://www.jackbe.com/customers/case_studies.php.