P&O NEDLLOYD FINALIZES E-COMMERCE STEPS

P&O NEDLLOYD FINALIZES E-COMMERCE STEPS

   P&O Nedlloyd Container Line said that it is ready to introduce real, integrated customer-facing e-commerce tools that will differentiate it from the surrounding “e-commerce hype” in liner shipping.

   Barry Williams, executive director of P&O Nedlloyd, said that many shipping lines have claimed to have sophisticated e-commerce interfaces on the web, when they really run “armies of employees re-keying data” received through the Internet.

   “There is perception, and there is reality,” he stressed.

   Several ocean carriers have been ahead of P&O Nedlloyd in e-commerce, but the carrier said that APL and “K” Line are currently the only carriers that provide five main services — schedules, cargo tracking, booking requests, shipping requests, Internet bills of lading and Internet invoicing and payments — on the web.

   P&O Nedlloyd is finalizing the introduction, by the end of the year, of three of those e-commerce tasks: booking requests, online shipping instructions and Internet bills of lading. It aims to add payments on the Internet next year.

   These activities, plus other e-commerce tasks, will use integrated data covering all activities and running from a secure central global data repository that acts as a mirror image of a web database, the carrier said.

   The Anglo-Dutch carrier aims to conduct about 20 percent of its business with customers online next year, covering the complete process, Williams said.

   In a significant organizational move, P&O Nedlloyd announced that it is transferring back office customer service activities, such as documentation, to a centralized “shared service center” in Pune, India, to reduce its customer service costs. The carrier aims to separate physical activities that have to be conducted near the customer from back office tasks that can be handled remotely. The shared service center will be a global resource handling back office tasks for customers worldwide.

   Gill Samuel, spokesman for P&O Nedlloyd, said that the company plans to expand its Indian service center from 55 employees to about 200 by the end of 2001.

   Another recent e-commerce initiative of P&O Nedlloyd is INTTRA, a common Internet platform backed by the company and four other European liner shipping groups. P&O Nedlloyd said that, with its current membership, INTTRA would be close to the carriers’ target of about 35 percent of the global liner shipping market.