Mr Simha noted that while DCSA currently has a limited membership group, representing major container carriers MSC, Maersk, CMA CGM, Hapag-Lloyd, ONE, Evergreen, Yang Ming, HMM and ZIM, the goal is to include more organisations in the future, and that all of the initiatives pursued by the members will be built on the concept of open access and neutrality.

“When we created the Association two years ago, we had to keep it to a very small group of people so that we could take decisions. If we had opened up immediately and ended up with 100 members it would have taken us much more time to release the standards we’ve already released,” he said.

“But of course, part of the work we need to do now is to start including other associations and vendors. We included vendors in some of the discussions, on IoT for example, but we definitely are going to be open to that now that we have an organisation that is properly structured.”

“The goal is to be completely neutral. We don’t talk about solutions; we allow vendors to do whatever they wish and hopefully one day we can put a stamp of approval to say it meets the standards. But that’s probably where it stops for the moment.”

Third party negotiations

Another difference between aviation and shipping highlighted by Mr Simha during the discussion is the larger number of third parties involved in managing maritime transport operations. Gaining acceptance for standardised digital processes among such a diverse and widespread set of stakeholders is a distinct challenge for cargo carriers.

“The work today that we do as a carrier, but also as DCSA, is to talk to the regulators, to talk to the customs authorities, to talk to various government entities, to talk to customers, vendors, ports, terminals. There are so many that we need to convince to come with us so we can move forward,” he said.

Mr Mulder agrees that this requirement to convince third parties to join digitalisation initiatives before they can see the consequent benefits can be a struggle. With most companies content to take a ‘wait and see’ approach, the industry needs strong early adopters to push changes through.

“Standards are no different from products, you see this when a new technology comes along, there’s the early innovators and the laggards, and most people are somewhere in between. In many cases with standards, we’re sort of in the very early stages of it, so while there are companies that will adopt them and implement them and be very happy with them, the bulk are waiting it out,” he said.

One of the third-party partners that both aviation and maritime transport companies share are the cargo owners themselves, and the freight forwarders acting on their behalf. In aviation at least, Mr Mulder notes that forwarders have been supportive in helping to push adoption of the digital standards that IATA wants to implement, such as the electronic Air Waybill (e-AWB) – an equivalent digital document to the maritime electronic Bill of Lading (eB/L) supported by DCSA and introduced by MSC to its customers at the end of April.

“The sort of problems that we have tried to solve from the air freight industry, with the forwarders as our partners, in many cases they have risen to the challenge and in many cases they are supportive. The Air Waybill is now at 75% adoption, it’s going very fast, that will be at 100% by the end of next year. That’s forwarders doing that, it’s not just the airlines, it’s mostly forwarders,” Mr Mulder explained.

“One thing is for sure, every company, inside their own operations, has digitised. They all have digital systems, it’s just that what comes out is not the same. The time we’ve taken to build these standards, it won’t be so long for you in maritime because there’s that advantage of building on what came before. One of my suggestions is to work with the forwarders and make sure that they learn from their own innovations they have already done on the aviation side.”

“In a way they are now the most important party in in the supply chain because they are the ones coordinating everything. When we’re doing developments, we always make every effort we can to involve them, certainly we work with the associations, for example, FIATA. Whenever we do anything, we invite them to participate, but they don’t always have the time and the resources. We reach out to individual companies, some of which are very interested in working with us. We would love to see more of them, for the simple reason that you cannot come up with digital solutions from one side only.” >>>continued on page 3