Dive Brief:

• Federal Maritime Commission commissioner Rebecca Dye recently convened 3 teams of 34 supply chain experts to advise on recommendations for operational challenges, American Shipper reported Wednesday.
• The teams focused on international imports at the ports of Los Angeles, Long Beach, and New York/New Jersey, which are three of the busiest gateways in the nation. 
• The result was unanimous among the groups, which called for the creation of a detailed national portal that would share critical data and further supply chain visibility. Collected data could reflect container, chassis and dray truck availability.

Dive Insight:

Data is king for the supply chain manager, which faced by threats of disruption and pressures to decrease operational costs welcomes any opportunity to spot supply chain inefficiencies. Even once a problem has been spotted, however, it can be difficult to drive improvement without benchmarks or best-in-class goals. 

The Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are already pioneers on this front, having recently announced they would report dwell times monthly. Other similar initiatives include a Port of Los Angeles partnership with GE Transportation to improve scheduling by expanding inbound vessel visibility to up to two weeks, and the Port of Montreal will use a cloud-based TMS to better coordinate inbound/outbound truck traffic.

The FMC innovation teams' visibility initiative should help some as the nation's largest ports collaborate to create these baselines and pursue greater efficiency. Adding data on chassis and container availability should help reduce dwell times by expediting and benchmarking the in-port movement of goods.