Until now, shipping companies have only provided customers with an estimate of when a vessel will arrive at port. This doesn’t really tell you much; after a vessel arrives in port your cargo you still need to wait until vessel and yard operations have been completed.
What you really want to know is when you can pick up your goods.
The shipping industry is nothing if not complicated; Maersk Line is addressing many industry-wide improvement areas through the challenges we’ve set on reliability, ease of business and environmental performance.
One of those areas is the industry’s inability to communicate in a non-technical way; providing you with the detailed shipment information that is relevant to your business needs. Maersk Line is now developing what will surely be a welcome alternative to one of the industry’s more common measures: ETA (Estimated Time of Arrival).
Until now, shipping companies have only provided customers with an estimate of when a vessel will arrive at port. This doesn’t really tell you very much; after a vessel arrives in port your cargo remains unavailable until it has been cleared.
What you really want to know is when you can pick up your goods.
That is where Cargo Availability Time, or CAT for short, comes in. It is our best estimate of when cargo will become available for you to pick-up.
“The CAT project is based on customers’ requesting to know when containers are expected to be available for pick up. A vessel ETA is irrelevant to the customer and forces them to come up with their own estimations for supply chain planning. CAT standardises the approach and will provide our customers with the best possible cargo availability date and time estimate using real data,” says Mike Andres, Maersk Line’s Head of Inland Operations BPO and in charge of the development of CAT.
Peter Hartz from Maersk Line’s Centre Customer Service, tells us: “We would like our customers not only to understand the concept, but also to take advantage of this new piece of information.”
When it is launched CAT will be visible to you in your booking confirmation (as an OTD promise) and your arrival notice. ETA will still be part of these documents and remains within our systems. However, CAT will be adjusted to take into account holidays, terminal gate hours of operations, how long it takes to perform port and inland vessel and yard operations and other factors that affect the availability of the container for pick-up.
