"A great deal of work had gone into understanding and reflecting local conditions, and Monarch allowed these customized applications to be retained while delivering information that would allow accurate pricing to be achieved for journeys end-to-end across the region."

 

APL has succesfully harnessed disparate sources of data into a manageable procedure to calculate point-to-point freight quotations.

In theory, the standardisation of containerised transport produces a near level playing field in which competition between logistics companies comes down to price and service. In practice, however, it is not that easy. Knowing the true costs involved at every stage of a journey - from Belgrade to Belfast for example - is the key to one supplier being able to move the same weight of goods in an identical container 10% more cheaply than another making 15% more profit.

The challenge facing the European arm of APL, the container shipping brand of Neptune Orient Lines, which operates a fleet of 124 vessels and handles inter-modal transport on 15,000 European routes, was in drawing together information from an array of PC spreadsheet applications, across Europe, each built from the ground up as a series of Microsoft Excel macros to reflect local operating conditions, taxes, tolls, surchages and repositioning costs. Moreover, each of those PC-based systems was supported with information from the company's US-based mainframe. Thus, integration of Pan-European data was vastly more complex than merely aggregating output.

"Until we could establish a method of extracting information from those systems to a common set of criteria, the result would have told us very little about the true costs of moving consignment," explained project manager in the UK, Ireland and Scandinavia, Sue Evans. "Practices necessarily vary from point to point within Europe to reflect how containers are re-located after an assignment, so we needed to be able to bring the costing process first to a common denominator."

The solution for collating intermodal costings proved to be a data-mining tool Monarch, from Ivybridge, Devon-based Datawatch, which was already in use by APL for accounting system reports analysis.

It was put to work in July 2007, transforming the task of mining output of local PC-based systems and drawing in key parameters from the business intelligence (BI) system handling output from the mainframe into a manageable structure. Essentially, this collation remained flexible enough to on the one hand provide the basis on which prices to a customer could be quoted for any journey within Europe - no matter how convulated the transport practices of the countries through which the container passes - while, on the other, retaining the flexibility for each country to continue its own costing systems.

"A great deal of work had gone into understanding and reflecting local conditions, and Monarch allowed these customised applications to be retained while delivering information that would allow accurate pricing to be achieved for journeys end-to-end across the region," explained Sue Evans.

"Once we had established a standard costing framework to which those local factors could be applied, we had the ability to draw down the information and integrate it through Monarch," she continued.

A set of more than 40 separate programme projects now reflects all of the possible intermodal combinations on which the company could be asked to quote in Europe. "It was important that we could incorporate these prices factors such as increases in fuel costs and pricing policy," she added.

Another feature of Monarch was its instrumental role in a further development - a proposed finance standardisation project under which it would import data from PDF copies of invoices, customarily displaying differing formats at each location.

Applying Monarch meant that there would be no need to redesign invoice formats in each country. "Once configured to recognise where the pertinent data lies in a given invoice format, the process is automated and the data absorbed automatically," said Ms Evans.

A Monarch licence, of which APL has three, costs £460, while training for integration to customers' needs costs £2,500. With the report mining 'infrastructure' created in the first instance by Sue Evans and her colleagues, authorised users are free to make changes to the routines, such as operating costs, which drive the Monarch application. That has led to a much quicker incorporation of changes and has resulted in a reduction of around 90% in the man-hours needed to maintain the system.

"Changes can be made instantly so the business is always able to run with the most current costs and build these into prices," she added. "We believe that this responsiveness gives the company a real competitive advantage."

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