Enhancing Customer Service With Real-Time Shipping Information

DP World Leverages Information Builders' Reporting and Integration Capabilities to Achieve Greater Visibility

In an increasingly competitive environment, it is important for transport companies to carry out logistics as efficiently as possible, using real-time information regarding the status of the containers in order to gain valuable time. Therefore, DP World began investigating a means of delivering this information via the Internet.

"We want our customers to be able to follow up on the status of their containers," says Bernard De Vriese, IT manager at DP World. "Is it still on the ship? Has customs been cleared? This status information is vital for the transport companies, so that they can minimize the time lost between availability of the container and the actual loading onto the truck." This information comes from various databases, so DP World needed a solution that could cope with this diversity of sources.

DP World was already a satisfied Information Builders customer, using FOCUS for various reporting purposes. Many of these reports were sent to customers on a daily or weekly basis, depending upon the customer's requirements. Given the excellent relationship between DP and Information Builders, they realized very quickly that Information Builders could provide exactly what DP World was looking for – WebFOCUS, Information Builders' enterprise business intelligence (BI) solution.

Using WebFOCUS, relevant information is drawn from separate databases and processed into a set of comprehensive reports. These reports are made available through the Web to the concerned parties, such as the shipping lines acting on behalf of the transport companies. Combined with the communication and integration power of iWay Software – Information Builders' integration solution division – this provides customers with a powerful tool for tracking and obtaining real-time information.

This new solution is now available to the shipping lines as a commercial service, trademarked as Eports. It provides customers with various types of reports: container log reports, detailing all the activities for the container; time-specific information, detailing all relevant activities within a given timeframe; reports on the loading and unloading of ships; an overview of all containers physically present on the docks at the current moment; and company-specific reports, such as lists of vessel names or the status of a specific entry. Custom reports can also be generated if required by the customer.

Shipping line agents are not required to constantly keep an eye on the Eports website to be informed of all recent status changes. Whenever anything changes within the content of a report on the Eports website, the customer is automatically informed about the change via a dynamic e-mail alert.

Eports has been an immediate success. Just a couple of months after the launch and presentation of the site, 25 of DP's consumers began using this service, and the rest are expected to, as the benefits they can achieve become too obvious to ignore.

The administrative staff at DP World has also experienced an important decrease in the number of phone calls it receives from customers inquiring about the status of a specific container. This, in turn, has enabled them to provide more value-added services, much to the delight of customers and the employees themselves.

Thanks to the powerful combination of WebFOCUS' business intelligence capabilities and iWay's flexible integration functionality, this success story is far from over. The number and type of reports that customers can query, for instance, will vary continuously, depending upon their requirements and feedback. The flexible reporting features of WebFOCUS make it easy to address any new reporting requirements as they emerge. WebFOCUS is also powerful enough to draw information from other databases, which will enable DP World to provide reports not only at container level, but also at parcel level. Other options are already being investigated, such as the ability to send alerts via Short Message Service (SMS) or General Packet Radio Services (GPRS), for data transfer over mobile phones. But these capabilities will only be considered if the customer requests them.

"That is one of the main reasons for choosing Information Builders," says DeVriese. "Their powerful and future-oriented products and architecture enable us to grow gradually at the pace of the customer. That way, we can always respond to specific customer needs, rather than trying to provide many features that customers have no real business need for."

By providing customers with a solution to a very critical business need – enabling them to speed up their supply chain by responding more quickly to a container's availability – DP World has created a key position for themselves in a competitive environment.

About Information Builders

Information Builders' award-winning combination of business intelligence and enterprise integration software has been providing innovative solutions to more than 12,000 customers for the past 30 years. WebFOCUS is the world's most widely utilized business intelligence platform. It provides the security, scalability and flexibility needed at every level of global extended enterprises. Its simplicity helps create executive, analytical, and operational applications that reach dozens to millions of users. Information Builders' iWay Software suite provides state of the art, multi-purpose, pre-built integration components that address all SOA, application, data and information management requirements. Its integration adapters have been adopted by the leading software platform providers. Together, these products give Information Builders' customers the ability to grow and innovate according to their needs.

Information Builders' customers include most of the Fortune 100 and U.S. federal government agencies. Headquartered in New York City with 90 offices worldwide, the company employs 1,450 people and has more than 350 business partners.

About iWay Software

iWay Software's integration methodology is simple: it uses a single, integrated set of graphical design tools to assemble powerful pre-built components for enterprise-class business-to-business (B2B) integration, business process automation (BPA), or enterprise information management (EIM) integration scenarios – without the use of custom code. Integration configurations can be deployed in a stand-alone manner to any environment supporting a JVM – or to Web application servers from any vendor. iWay delivers the fastest, most cost-effective, and simplest way to integrate and streamline critical business processes. iWay Software's vendor-, platform-, and protocol-neutral solutions achieve the promise of SOA: true reusability.