Spending hours manually tracking shipments is a waste of time and resources, and for this reason BlueBox Systems, a developer of air freight tracking solutions, is offering a new function that allows access to the estimated time of arrival (ETA) information for shipments.

“We continuously track thousands of shipments every day,” explained Martin Bernemann, chief technical officer at BlueBox Systems. “Using this information, we have built a database from which we can derive the ETA of new shipments. This intelligent function offers shippers and carriers the best possible prediction given the information available.”

With the new feature, Bernemann and his team are trying to solve one of the biggest challenges in the supply chain, which he described as ‘inaccurate ETAs from carriers’.

With precise ETA predictions, logistics professionals can estimate exactly where the shipment is and when it will arrive at its destination. This allows proactive adjustments to be made to downstream activities in the supply chain, such as rescheduling loading dates.

This gives shippers and forwarders a better overview of their transport and logistics processes and allows them to plan more efficiently. Being able to calculate arrival times quickly and accurately reduces the consequences of irregularities like delays and ultimately lowers transportation costs.

The industry has been working with loose ETA timeframes in the past, but this has now become insufficient, with customers demanding precise insights into where their shipment is and when it will arrive.

“If you don’t know exactly where your expected deliveries are and if you don’t fulfill your customers’ wishes in terms of deliveries, all other positive services can become pointless,” commented Bernemann.