ICT practices in container transport

Information systems and integrated transport and logistics chain are closely related since a good information management is essential for a transport company to be truly integrated. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) facilitate the management of interconnecting major information flows related to goods flows, among all actors involved in the service production process. Nevertheless, the use of ICT is irregularly distributed among the various modes. Single-mode operators such as air, railways, and road transport companies have for a long time used in-house information systems supporting their operations. The ocean transport industry represents a good exception to the slow implementation of ICT. In the liner shipping sector, despite the efforts to open up joint information systems between shipping lines, ports and other actors integrated ICT systems has not taken off. This means that the scope ICT offers for underpinning basic services with value-added supply chain services, has not been fully exploited by liner shipping companies. In this chapter the impact of ICT on the liner shipping supply chain is investigated. What the work attempts to do is to bring together the Supply Chain Management (SCM) approach and the ICT integration perspective. Due to the breadth of ICT and its rapidly changing nature, the work focus on a number of key issues rather than produce a generic survey on systems and applications which would be out of date in a short time. After reviewing the relevant literature on the topic, a relationship between logistics integration and ICT co-ordination among the different stages of the supply chain has been found. Accordingly, three different steps characterised by different level of logistics and information integration have been indentified. In the first step, the use of ICT was limited to EDP and it was mainly finalised to reach a level of internal integration between company departments to better co-ordinate operations with administrative and accountancy needs. The second stage is characterised by higher degree of supply chain integration as result of the provision of logistics services beyond pure maritime transport services. To achieve such an objective interconnected and interoperable ICT systems need to be adopted (e.g. e-commerce). Finally, the third stage is characterised by the full integration driven by the massive use of ICT and e-business applications. In this stage, shipping lines is required to shift their business model from purely asset-based to a more soft and knowledge approach.