In an ocean freight market driven by ever-shifting capacity and prices, effectively managing carrier allocations and bookings can be a daunting task. You need to constantly track your volume for each carrier partner to ensure that you’re meeting your contract commitment, while also making real-time adjustments based on ongoing performance. This process is typically filled with endless emails and tangled spreadsheets, creating a time-consuming and often chaotic system prone to human error.

The solution? Using data to inform your carrier allocation decisions in real time. To give you instant visibility into and control of your ocean carrier allocation, we’ve upgraded our Booking Management tool with the Allocation Management dashboard—your solution for optimizing your ocean freight strategy and decision-making process with ease and accuracy.

Real-Time Data in One Unified, Easy-to-Use Dashboard

Supply chain and logistics managers’ top headaches often hinge on the ability to have all supply chain information in one place to make better decisions. That’s why our enhanced allocation tool consolidates data across your entire network of suppliers, lanes, and ocean freight providers into a single, easy-to-navigate live dashboard—one that offers a holistic view of your global allocation performance.

There are three main data components that feed into our real-time analytics: bookings placed by shippers through the Flexport platform, contract-level agreement data, and real-time carrier booking data. Flexport digitizes and consolidates this data into one unified live dashboard. Users can view high-level contract compliance, with the ability to break down performance by lane, carrier, and country to understand allocation adherence and volume trends.

Within the tool, you can refine your search by trade lane, carrier, contract, and validity period. You can track year-to-date volumes for your contracts, as well as specific monthly volumes, obtaining a detailed view to compare how you’re performing against your committed contracts.

Ultimately, you get a single pane of glass through which you can monitor shipping volumes, identify instances of contract overutilization or underutilization, and leverage data to collaborate more effectively with your carriers—whether it be to negotiate increases or decreases in allocation or look for providers of spot allocation to handle volume surges. This empowers you to ensure that every booking and shipment is on track, and make swifter decisions to adjust your carrier allocation strategy.

Forward-Looking Visibility Gives You Better Control

Staying up to date on your carrier utilization is critical, but to truly take control of your ocean carrier management, you need to plan ahead, too. That’s why our tool has forward-looking capabilities to help you proactively plan your carrier allocation, anticipate needs, and stay agile.

The tool allows you to view future volume performance for specific carriers or lanes, providing useful data for future contract planning. Users can extend their search criteria into future weeks to evaluate active carrier bookings against their allocations, and make adjustments to move up or delay shipper volumes to align with fixed allocations. This not only allows importers or exporters to plan and manage future volume assignments more effectively, but also improves on-time shipping to ensure product is moving off the factory floor for consistent production runs.

The ocean freight market is constantly evolving. Leveraging data to plan for today and the future is key to staying agile and lowering your overall supply chain costs. To learn more about our allocation tool included in our Booking Management offering, schedule a demo today with a Flexport representative.