transportationreport

NOT LONG AGO, A GROUP OF DATA-LOVING “quants” at Danish container shipping giant Maersk Line, the largest operating unit of A.P. Moeller-Maersk A/S, spent a week with the liner’s operations folks. The goal: to crunch massive volumes of data in an effort to boost the utilization of Maersk equipment, which transports the equivalent of 15 percent of the world’s gross domestic product (GDP).

Consistent with data people’s desire to work untethered from the rest of the organization, the quants—or quantitative analysts—asked that the operations executives restrict their data center visits to only twice a day. That request went unheeded, however. According to Jan Voetmann, director and head of engagement for Maersk Analytics, the operations people became so intrigued by what the data unearthed that they hung out with the quants for virtually the entire week.

For example, Maersk discovered that an empty container
had sailed on five consecutive voyages. In another case, an
empty box went back and forth 20 times on 10 sailings. To
be sure, both episodes are insignificant in the grand scheme
of the world’s largest container network (by capacity). But
where there’s smoke, there may be fire. Maersk spends about
US$1 billion a year just to move empty containers around its
network, according to Voetmann. That doesn’t include the
costs incurred in tracking the boxes, he said. By seeing deep-
er into their global operations than they ever have before,
Maersk executives can forecast equipment movements two
months out instead of in the traditional four-week window,
thus reducing the frequency of empty moves and enabling
them to better match equipment with cargo, Voetmann said.

Welcome to the world of “big data”—seafaring style. The term—believed to have been the brainchild of an astute marketer—is technically defined as the aggregation and blending of “structured” data on traditional platforms like electronic data interchange (EDI), enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, and extensible markup language (XML), with “unstructured” data, or information flowing outside the normal channels. The holy grail is to present