21 Jan How AI Based PrimeAllocation Forecasting Helps Your Business Grow
Over the past few decades, ocean freight shipping has become the dominant way to reliably transport large-volume goods between different places all over the world – resulting in hundreds of millions of containers having been shipped during the fiscal year of 2020.
One of the main reasons for this dominance is the fact that ocean freight shipping is one of the most cost-effective ways of transporting large-volume goods across the globe. Needless to say, this has caused ocean freight shipping to become an interesting means of transport for growing businesses that want to provide their products to clients all over the world.
However, booking cargo space on one of your favorite trade lanes may be a challenging task due to the inherent complexity of the ocean freight shipping industry. Besides that, prices often depend on long-standing relations with ocean freight companies and boat owners, putting new entrants to the market at a disadvantage compared to more mature businesses. At PrimeFreight, we’re in a continuous search on how we can create innovative solutions that improve the services that we offer to our clients. Thorough investigation showed that the most important thing that our clients seek when shipping cargo all over the world is reliability and consistency in container space availability – without having to pay excessive prices and whilst guaranteeing capacity on their favorite shipping lanes at all times.
You can compare this to a more traditional scenario from the manufacturing industry: to meet future product demand, manufacturing companies must guarantee a steady inflow of raw materials at reasonable prices. Nowadays, they do this by using intelligent algorithms that are capable of both predicting future product demand and monitoring material stock – resulting in a steady inflow of raw materials at reasonable prices, even during the most uncertain times.
Just like manufacturing companies are worrying about the availability of affordable raw materials, Growing businesses are worrying about the affordable availability of container space on their favorite shipping lanes – r resulting in high demand for a solution that is capable of consistently providing just that.
To fulfill this demand, we at PrimeFreight have put a great deal of effort into creating the prime allocation forecasting solution. Just like manufacturing companies utilize the power of machine learning to predict future product demand and to automatically order the required raw materials, the prime allocation forecasting solution determines your future cargo-space demand and automatically pre-allocates this space for you on our available vessels.
Our machine learning-based forecasting algorithm takes care of this by taking into account data from three different sources. First, the algorithm uses your track record of previous cargo shipping data to detect patterns or systematic behavior in your cargo size and both your favorite shipping lanes and shipping frequency. These patterns are then enriched with data that flows directly from your Purchase Order (PO) management system or Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system and with data that is provided by your suppliers. All of this information is then used by our proprietary artificial intelligence based machine learning algorithm to determine a detailed, short-term cargo requirement forecast – specifically tailored to your shipping requirements.
However, PrimeFreight does not stop there. For us, the true customer value of these client-specific cargo forecasts lies with materializing them by pre-allocating the necessary container space on vessels and negotiating the best price possible – all of which is done way ahead of time. By doing this, PrimeFreight can guarantee the availability of your requested shipment in 98% of the cases whilst guaranteeing the best price possible at all times.
Therefore, by pre-allocating this cargo space – which fits your business requirements at any point in time -, the PrimeAllocation Forecasting solution can take away the burden of having to worry about reliable and affordable container space availability – allowing you to simplify your operations and focus on your business instead.