Shifl, an international freight forwarder, announced Monday it has partnered with Terminal49, a shipment- and container-tracking platform, to give customers accurate, real-time visibility that synchronizes all parties involved with international shipping.
“The partnership with Terminal49 has been amazing,” said Shabsie Levy, the founder and CEO of Shifl, in an interview with FreightWaves. “We are furthering our goal of creating visibility tools for our customers and being able to manipulate and build our processes around that real-time data with our team of programmers.”
Real-time visibility has been a trending topic of conversation as many supply chain visibility companies have raised funds to provide shippers with insights on their shipments’ whereabouts, including FourKites, project44 and Overhaul.
What makes Terminal49 unique is its origin story rooted in drayage operations, which has enabled the company to build integrations with all U.S. and Canadian ports, along with a collaborative dashboard that connects all parties.
Levy said Terminal49’s relationships with ports and its drayage carriers have created a competitive advantage.
“One of the biggest problems we were having was finding reliable data,” he said. “That’s how the Terminal49 partnership came to be. We’re actually getting reliable data that we can use to further our company goals and accurately automate the entire importing process with minimal or no involvement.”
In an interview with FreightWaves, co-founder and CEO of Terminal49 Akshay Dodeja explained how his team uses this data to offer customers and integration partners actionable insights for overall supply chain efficiency.
“We can take a bill of lading number or booking number and we can automatically populate the shipment details, including the estimated departure time and the estimated arrival time from standardized data entry that we have initiated across all carriers so there is no data cleanup work,” Dodeja said.
“Secondly, we can give reliable information on critical events as they are happening, not after the event has happened. Finally, our operational data is critical to scheduling pickup and delivery of containers, including real-time availability at the port terminal.”
As companies continue to scale operations, much like Shifl has done since 2016, Terminal49 is able to create custom terminal integrations to fit customers’ growing service offerings.
“Our philosophy is not just to bring people to our dashboard, but give the power of our data to all of the dashboards and move the entire industry forward,” Dodeja explained. “We want to drive down the cost of getting these data integrations and make it easy for engineers to fully integrate and implement these tools in a month or two.”
With Shifl’s new visibility partnership, it can continue to empower small businesses all over the world, including customers in places such as China, India, Vietnam, Bangladesh and the Philippines.
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