OpenTrack Enhanced Rail Visibility vs. Steamship Line data
For containers going inland, Steamship lines coordinate with the rail carriers to move containers from vessels through terminals and onto the rail. As a result, they will often report some data on the rail leg movements. However, anyone who tracks these movements for operationally critical workflows knows that relying on the steamship line data is not enough. It is lacking in key dimensions of completeness, timeliness and accuracy.
By integrating deeply directly with the rail carriers, and leveraging our own algorithms on top, we built enhanced rail visibility to address these gaps and deliver our customers the data they need directly in their OpenTrack feed.
The following is an overview of our approach and the key areas we have set out to improve.
3x More Accurate ETAs
Steamship lines are not great at predicting inland ETAs. In fact their initial ETAs are dramatically under-estimated across the board.
As they get closer to arrival, and especially at port when dwell time uncertainty spikes, they are prone to significant errors.
Using our own algorithms, trained on millions of monthly data points, we’re able to report ETAs that are on average 3x more accurate.
This makes a huge difference managing customer expectations and coordinating pickup/receiving workflows.
Milestone Completeness & Timeliness
Steamship lines report some rail milestones, but not consistently, and often with significant latency. We track completeness and latency closely, so we can measure the difference between just receiving rail milestones from the Steamship Line and receiving them directly from rail carriers via OpenTrack’s enhanced rail visibility.
Looking at some key rail milestones, we can see some big gaps being filled by data from rail carriers.
For example:
- Departed milestone is 8% more present
- Arrived milestone is 12% more present
When we consider the Available milestone the difference is even more striking. The Available milestone is 25 times more present in the enhanced rail visibility feed compared to the steamship line alone.
Timeliness is also critical, and we can see huge benefits there too:
- Departed milestone is 20% more timely
- Arrived milestone is 100% more timely (2x less latency)
- Outgated is 114% more timely
- Unloaded milestone is 200% (3x less latency)
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Sightings
Milestones are critical, but on the rail, it’s also essential to receive granular progress updates as the train moves across the country. Steamship lines often don’t provide these sightings, so integrating rail carrier is essential to providing a consistent experience.
Thanks to these sightings, we can even report border crossing events which are essential to certain compliance workflows.
Last Free Day
As a container is de-ramped at an inland rail terminal, it’s important to know when they are available for pickup and the last free day for pickup. Relying on the ocean carrier’s LFD alone is not enough. The ramp LFD can be earlier (It is about 10% of the time).
Gate Transactions
Many folks have gotten used to collecting pickup details from truckers or by manually logging into railroad websites to grab the J1 details. That’s why a big part of Enhanced Rail visibility is leveraging our integrations to pull the J1 details straight into OpenTrack.
- More accurate outgate date
- Trucker info
- Chassis numbers
