TradeLens is digitising and transforming trade for the benefit of industry and authorities all along the global supply chain. It offers a more open, trusted, transparent and secure way to conduct trade through a business platform model underpinned by blockchain.
The TradeLens platform has been jointly developed by Maersk and IBM and is supported by major carriers covering more than 60% of global containerised trade.
Traditionally, critical shipping data has been held in paper and various digital formats across dozens of service providers along the supply chain, requiring complex, cumbersome, and costly peer-to-peer messaging. The result is inconsistent information across organisational boundaries, latency in obtaining shipment visibility, and blind spots that hinder the efficient flow of goods.
The collection and processing of timely data and the latest documentation requires businesses to spend time on manual checks and frequent follow-ups that result in errors, delays and high compliance costs.
These challenges have significant downstream repercussions. The inability to forecast and plan effectively, address supply chain disruptions in near real-time, and share trusted information across the supply chain leads to excessive safety stock inventory, high administrative costs, operational challenges, and ultimately poor customer service.
Main features of the platform
TradeLens eBL – A digital electronic Bill of Lading (eBL) solution that provides shippers, cargo owners and freight-forwarders a streamlined and secure process for the issue, transfer and surrender of original bills of lading.
Transport insight – Get dynamically updated transport plans with data from upstream and downstream, keeping you informed of changes that could impact your shipment, while keeping all parties updated.
Document sharing – Quickly access and share digitised trade documents and associated events with your supply-chain partners, with an immutable audit trail and crystal-clear version control.
Notifications – Set notifications for your critical shipping and document events, so your teams are alerted to those events immediately on in-house systems or mobile devices.
API integration – The platform is integrated through non-proprietary, publicly available APIs that are simple to set-up, so you and your partners can quickly share data and expedite trade.
Partner access – Bring your suppliers, customers, transportation providers, and logistics partners to create a collaboration workspace, where everyone is working off the same data and documents.
Security
This platform is built with the comprehensive security capabilities of a mission-critical platform handling data for Fortune 500 clients.
Critical shipping data and information about a shipment are accessible only to permissioned parties. Hashes of critical documents are published to the TradeLens blockchain for immutability and transparency. The platform has also been developed with comprehensive security measures in place to prevent intrusion and other threats and is accredited with the ISO27001 IT security certification.
For more information on this new platform, click here.