| BY HELEN ATKINSON ONE REASON CARRIERS ARE
reluctant to embrace online transportation services is that they're afraid
to share information with potential competitors, an industry consultant says.
Charles Beard, managing director
of transportation e-solutions at KPMG, has just completed a report on the transportation
industry and e-commerce.
Beard found that while shippers want
one-stop shopping for information about their goods' journey through the supply chain,
carriers don't necessarily see that as being in their interests.
Many in the logistics industry
are striving toward what is called see where an order of sweaters is, whether it's on a
truck in India, on a ship in the Atlantic, or on a railcar in Virginia.
Some of the transportation software
and e-commerce companies, such as Celarix, say they are close to making that a reality.
But a fundamental problem with visibility is that it means each party must send
information to a single source, effectively sharing information with potential
competitors. This seems to hit carriers, hardest, Beard said.
"You don't see Sprint and
AT&T sharing information about how much they charge their customers," Beard said.
Carriers don't want to either, he added. But they will probably have to, Beard said as
customers increase their demand for what he calls "e-business maturity."
"We probably will start to see
information sharing between the carriers. Everyone wants to see through the glass pipe
these days," he said.
Unless a company is handling every leg of a
cargo's journey, " you're going to have to get into the information-sharing business,
and that's not easy," he said. |
Generally, the KPMG study found that carriers are at a Stage of e-commerce maturity that
Beard described as "transactional," but that shippers and analysts want to see
carriers getting "interactive" through the Internet.
The 'transactional stage means
that carriers have advanced from merely posting information on a Web site to allowing
customers to book cargo or make other requests.
The interactive stage provide the carriers'
customers with a transportation service that is a working part of a dynamic manufacturing
and distribution system.
"You're going to see a lot more of
companies taking transportation systems and integrating them into the manufacturing
schedules to get real-time product," Beard said.
But there is plenty to scare the
carrier in the new e-commerce world. Carriers remain leery of online auctions of
transportation services. They worry that such auctions would turn carriers'
services into a commodity that is sold on price alone.
"Some carriers are beginning to see impact on their
business from these things, and they're being rate-shopped," Beard said.
"This is an industry, that's largely built
on relationships and performance and now what we're seeing is that certain loads that You
would have given to' your carrier of choice, the transport manager is shopping around for
a lower rate and going back to the carrier and saying: look how much money I can
save." Beard emphasized the main conclusion of his study was that
relationships between carriers and customers will remain crucial, and that the Internet
would be a useful tool to facilitate that.
Those
interested in receiving a free copy of the report can e-mail Ikodama@kpmg.com.
Helen Atkinson can be reached at hatkinson@mail.joc.com
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