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Preparing
to take the next steps in Every fleet owner wants basic information about his vessels: where they are; what they are doing; are they on route and on time and so forth. Every cargo owner wants similar information about his cargo. But in the case of perishable goods they also want to know that it is at the correct temperature and that the goods will be of the necessary quality when they arrive. Perishable cargo differs from dry cargo in a number of ways. One of these is that a 'total constructive loss' can be arrived at in fewer than three different ways! First of all perishable cargo is vulnerable to theft and pilferage, as are many cargoes (but this problem tends to be small). Second and more relevantly, it is vulnerable to damage if the right conditions of carriage needed are not provided - temperature, airflow, gas mixture and so forth. And third, for perishable foodstuffs, there is invariably a 'just-in-time' quality to each shipment: late arrival at one end of the supply chain results in loss of shelf time for sales at the other. Therefore late arrival can result in the entire cargo's having to be written off. As a consequence, insurance rates for perishable cargo are on average seven times higher than the rates for dry cargo! Using technology to assist in this tracking and monitoring process has been technically possible for some time, but too expensive to be used on anything other than the most valuable and vulnerable shipments. This position is now changing, however, as new, low-cost technologies are coming into existence. Indeed, so impressive are these technologies that early users are predicting that within three years every major shipper of temperature-regulated cargo will offer remotely available information on its real-time position together with temperature and other conditions of carriage. However, it is not stopping there - temperature variances and other conditions requiring change will be able to be changed remotely. No longer will the quality of the delivered product be reliant on a deck hand climbing around the open deck in all weathers or on a driver halting sufficiently regularly to check reefer performance. These predictions are not caused by any sea change in requirements from the end-customer; the demand for better information and improved delivered quality has always been there. Instead what is changing rapidly is the disappearance of the limitations that have thwarted it. These have been created by inadequate technology that has demanded a high price for a relatively low-value set of services. Over the next 12 months most of these limitations will have disappeared and a new low-cost technology-set will be in widespread use, enabling high-functionality services, such as those described above. There are two key changes that are the main drivers of this. The first is the arrival of fully functioning low earth-orbiting satellites (or 'LEOs' for short). For the international multimodal transport industry this has been a change of the highest significance. Up until now communication options have severely limited any sort of end-to-end tracking service for multimodal transit. The second change, which is of equal significance, is the increasing ubiquity of the Internet. Its low cost, its increasing use by those engaged in international transportation and its worldwide access make it a key delivery means for cross-domain information. There have been and still are many communication options available to the shipper. For instance, VHF radio has many offerings but is limited by national licensing arrangements and the need to build terrestrial stations: thus there is no viable multi-country option. GSM (Global Standard for Mobile telephony) is an improvement on this but is still not good enough. There is not, in fact, one standard - there are three (900,1800 and 1900 megahertz), and it is expensive when used cross-border owing to international gateway charges. In any case, it covers less than 6% of the land-mass of the world and, of course, none of the sea. By comparison, satellites have been in use for over three decades. But the traditional, or geostationary, options have had only very limited use in cargo transportation. This is because their costs have been high and the equipment used has needed large antennae with high power requirements. This is inconvenient to say the least if installed on containers with no power source, which then cannot make intermodal moves because of the large antenna! But this has been changed by the launch of the first commercially available LEOs. These in effect provide GSM-type digital messaging, but over a global footprint and at much more competitive rates. A key advantage of LEO usage is the small antennae used and their low power requirements. These mean that the devices can be battery-supported and are not reliant on ship or vehicle power supply. Just as importantly, the flat antenna used does not interfere with intermodal movement or container stacking. The most successful of these new LEO operators is Orbcomm, which was started up by Orbital Science Corporation Inc of Dulles, Virginia, in the US and went live to its customers at the beginning of 1999. Orbcomm is now a worldwide consortium with representatives in every major country, and its network had 28 satellites in orbit by the end of 1999, with more satellite launches planned this year. Already most of the world has high-availability coverage and future launches will improve this even further. Tri-mex, an Anglo-Norwegian company, has been one of the first to recognise the potential of using LEO communication in the movement of perishable cargoes. Its cargo-tracker service is designed specifically for the requirements of the transportation of temperature-regulated cargo. It integrated its Windows-based tracking and monitoring technology with Orbcomm LEO communicators and has generated a service where a cargo can be tracked and monitored anywhere in the world - whether on land or at sea. The information generated is shown on its dedicated website that can be accessed via any Internet-connected terminal, anywhere in the world. From the beginning Tri-mex saw that its customers wanted more that just tracking and monitoring - they wanted a service that would respond and provide direct action if required. So, in 1999, Tri-mex opened a control centre in Oslo. This is dedicated to monitoring cargo in transit worldwide, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and providing direct, multi-lingual responses in the event of problems. This is a unique facility equipped with electronic maps and charts covering the world, linked to databases on emergency services and with feeds that update information on transportation conditions, minute by minute, across the world. It was this service-driven approach that persuaded the Tracar 2 consortium to appoint Tri-mex to provide the Cargo-Tracker service for its project. Tracar 2 is a project partly funded by the European Union and managed by Cable & Wireless with major transport companies such as K-Lines, Bluewater Shipping and Scan Shipping. The project is aiming to test the tracking and monitoring of dry containers and reefers moving dry and perishable goods between Aarhus in Denmark and Oporto in Portugal. Tri-mex is installing the technology needed on each container and then providing the tracking and monitoring service through and www.cargo-tracker.com. For perishable cargoes, if temperature-tolerance bands are breached the control centre will respond by making calls to the ship or port and summon manual assistance. This process will take only a few minutes, wherever the cargo is in Europe. A key development in the project, and a first in the industry, is the integration of low-frequency tags with the Tri-mex service. This will allow precise tracking of containers in port areas. Another innovation being tested live for the first time will be the capability to 'interrogate' a container wherever it is loaded on the ship - be it above or below deck. This will allow genuine end-to-end monitoring of an intermodal transit through the sea passage, a movement phase that, to date, has been 'blind' or in which containers have had to be pre-positioned on deck to communicate. Tracar 2 went live in October 1999 and ran through to the end of the year. In addition to this, a capability that leading shippers of perishable goods are looking to test is direct intervention across the network. This involves correcting a temperature variance by an electronic message communicated directly to the instrumentation of the reefer. Within the Tri-mex service, this facility is planned for release by mid-2000. When in use it will further obviate the need for staff to be employed in local monitoring duties as more and more responsibility can be assumed remotely. For the perishables transportation industry a new age is dawning. Low-cost technology is allowing tracking, monitoring and intervention for the first time on all classes of cargo. This increases the information available to the client and improves the delivered quality of the goods. For the first time conditions being experienced by cargoes in reefers can be monitored remotely and responded to in minutes in many cases electronically. This will improve the service record of movements of perishables and will bring down operational costs - to the benefit of shipper and customer alike. It may even bring the insurance rates down - a move that would be universally welcomed by carriers but may not necessarily be appreciated by the insurance industry! Peter Vyvyan-Robinson is managing director of Tri-Mex International, based in London |