What they know now is through ELD and software on truck shipments here in the USA. The problem is not knowing where your freight is in the rest of the world, on its way to the USA. From the factory to the foreign tax stops (border crossings), to the re-load, to the consolidators to the ocean/air terminal—those are the points we know very little about. And normally, we can see where our goods are inside the USA, but there is much more that showed up in the pandemic: The freight is on the ship, waiting to get into the harbor, and we can’t unload it?! Is it on land, is it at the terminal, has it been loaded onto the rail intermodal train taking it into the heartland, is it in a warehouse truck court? These are the questions that Bloodhound Tracking Device will answer. Plus, BTD will add visibility to all of the custody transfer points overseas, enroute, providing a fully transparent supply chain which is not dependent on human interface.
Value Proposition
Ocean carriers need to track empties in real time
Shippers are desperate to know, with certainty, where their freight is!
Has my freight been compromised, stolen, or lost?
Most US shippers today do not ever use a Mexican port, with an intermodal train, to get their merchandise to the US. The route makes perfect sense from Asia: it’s faster than through LA/LB and into the heartland and it’s cheaper, but nobody uses it because of security issues. Trains run very slowly in Mexico. The BTD Unit snaps a picture and uploads it every time the door is opened! With that function, there is no need to wonder how that contraband got placed into a Tier 3 CTPAT container loaded with apparel. No need to worry that a terrorist can compromise the legitimate supply chain, because the BTD sniffer not only knows that there is a chemical substance aboard, but what kind of chemical it is!
The cost for repositioning containers within the US is approximately $500 Million per year, per ocean carrier.
The average turn-time (round trip) per container globally is 4 round turns per year. With accurate tracking of empties, the ocean carriers can each gain up to 2 additional turns per container per year, but easily 1 additional turn per year. That is a huge cost reduction!
Case Study
Hapag Lloyd, the 5th largest Ocean Carrier by volume, has just employed two vendors, each with just a simple GPS tracker on their units to track and trace all 878,000 containers in their fleet.
They will take 6-7 years to install them, at a CapEx of $675 each and a monitoring fee of $40 per unit, per month. Bloodhound is a superior unit, with Zero CapEx, and a very low monthly fee per unit per month that includes the full monitoring and all CAPEX.
2024 update: ZIM and the ONE lines have now agreed to add GPS-only devises to the outside of each dry box in their fleets. This now cements the reality that a sophisticated tracking and security device is a must-have for carriers!
A real customer-driven value proposition monopoly is what each Carrier wants!
For a very small fee ($26/month per unit in commercial volumes), major ocean carriers will be able to specifically identify exactly where and what’s the status inside a container globally for the first time in history. That sales advantage for such a low cost, with a back-end value to the carrier via the empty re-positioning advantage, will be priceless to any carrier. Today, containerized shipping is a commodity. In fact, ocean shipping rarely differs in price from one carrier to another. With the BTD attached to a carrier’s boxes, such a value proposition will not only be unique, but it will also be an easy pass-through charge to the ultimate Beneficial Cargo Owner (BCO/Customer).
The BCO needs a new perk to continue with CTPAT, and Bloodhound is actively working to secure a Tier 4 status to any BCO/Importer who uses the device/system.
There are currently only 3 Tiers of CTPAT membership, and over 11,400 shippers, ocean carriers, freight forwarders (FF), Custom House Brokers and others are members. Tier 3 is the highest level today, and it helps speed up the supply chain, but it is still not enough. As the chairman of the CTPAT COAC Committee for 4 years, the CEO of IMSW was very close to CBP in forging and creating new and more commercially acceptable CTPAT benefits. Bloodhound Tracking Device believes that asking for these additions to CTPAT Tier 4 or equivalent would be warranted because the carriers and BCOs will know, in real time, the security condition of the box. BTD executives are asking Customs (CBP) for these added benefits to a new Tier 4 status:
Zero Inspections (except for terrorism reasons found through other channels).
Fast Track border crossing (this is especially fruitful for intermodal container trains from Canada and Mexico that could be aided by using the BTD device, and its use would easily de-congest the borders).
Less Validations. Currently each CTPAT participant gets validated every 1-3 years and by reaching Tier 4, the validation could be for as long as every 5 years.
Huge improvement in CTPAT participants’ TMS and GTS tracking.
The lack of predictability created by the global pandemic has made asset tracking (non-powered ocean containers specifically) even more critical for organizations and their customers.
A recent Freight Waves survey of Supply Chain executives in Summer of 2021 reported that 63% said real-time track and trace is the most important customized feature to them in any supply chain monitoring system. Shockingly, 63% of respondents also said that the method they use to perform track and trace processes to gain visibility for the products currently within their supply chain is their employees making check calls. The number one need for those same executives was to know, for certain, where the freight is located, and if it has been compromised!
The hole in the donut of many of the systems on the market is there is no universal device/system that accurately tracks and detects anomalies in your freight at a cost of less than $150 per shipment, and cumbersome install, de-install, and return-to-owner process. BTD has no CapEx and requires only a $26/unit lease (in commercial volumes).
