How sea freight tracking can help your wine business thrive

By volume, almost 90% of goods traded globally are transported by sea freight. And with increasingly complex and demanding supply chains, global visibility solutions are pivotal not only to monitoring and reporting on shipments, but also to reducing and streamlining operations. Successful sea freight tracking software can be the difference between timely, successful shipping and costly errors.

How do I track my sea freight shipment?

From shippers to consumers, live tracking data has become the expected minimum standard for global trade. But while many services offer ocean vessel tracking based on Automatic Identification System (AIS) data, for diverse and complex supply chains in uncertain global conditions, sea freight tracking can quickly become a time and resource-intensive activity.

The more complex your supply chain, the more sources you need to use to track your shipments, unless you have access to one platform that can give you true end-to-end visibility. 

Thankfully, sea freight tracking has come a long way from providing basic geographical location data. With tools like myHillebrandGori, shippers can view and share data with all of the parties involved in the supply chain, monitor environmental conditions en route and get advance insight into potential avoidable costs such as demurrage or detention charges.

Existing Hillebrand Gori customers can login to their account here or sign up for an account here.

How do I track an import shipment?

If there is a delay or other issue with your shipment, you’ll want to be able to communicate this to other parties in your supply chain quickly. Sea freight tracking lets you track an import shipment with data from GPS, satellite, manifest data, container number or bill of lading. Your carrier may also offer a complete visibility sea freight tracking system, making your job simpler.

What information can I get through sea freight tracking?

If you do your sea freight tracking manually, then you will have access to location information for the container or vessel your shipment is in. Comprehensive sea freight tracking systems, like myHillebrandGori put everything you need in one place, so you can answer questions like:

1. When is my container due to arrive?
2. What is the carbon footprint of my shipment?
3. Is my container at risk of incurring demurrage or detention charges?
4. What are the climatic conditions on my shipment’s route?
5. How many of my containers are awaiting shipment?

The benefits of sea freight tracking

With all the information you need in one place, sea freight tracking can help you make better decisions about your beverage shipments, even before they have been collected from the winery. For example, with access to historical temperature data for your shipment's route, you can decide on the most appropriate type of container to protect the quality of your wine or other alcoholic beverages in transit. Other benefits of sea freight tracking for your business include:

1. Identify unplanned costs early
2. Quickly assess and manage risks
3. Identify and resolve errors quickly
4. Foresee delays and manage your supply chain
5. Build trust by keeping customers up to date with their order status

Our complete end-to-end sea freight tracking software, myHillebrandGori, provides all the information you need to manage and track your shipment for any route or date in one place. Our software can even tell you about the temperature and humidity conditions in real time on certain legs of your beverages’ journey, giving you better insight and control over your shipments. Collaborating with customers, colleagues and partners is quick and easy with myHillebrandGori too.

Sea freight tracking visibility for the whole supply chain

In a complex logistics network, there will be many different people involved in the supply chain. Sea freight tracking data needs to be available to the whole supply chain. Here’s a rundown of the people involved in a typical alcoholic beverage industry supply chain and roles involved in the shipping process.

1. Shipper: responsible for organizing and preparing the shipment for export. In the beverage industry, the shipper is often the exporter (supplier). Exporters need accurate, timely information on the collection date/time and an easy way to manage export documentation. 
2. Freight payer: for wine or other alcoholic beverage shipments, this is usually the wine importer (buyer). The importer is the one who needs all the data they can get - tracking, on-time status, any shipped order discrepancies and easy access to documents like commercial invoice etc.
3. Freight Forwarder: Acting on behalf of the shipper, freight forwarders ‘forward’ freight to carriers, who take it to its destination. On top of this, some freight forwarders like Hillebrand Gori offer a complete end-to-end service. This means they manage every aspect of moving beverage shipments between locations, including cargo insurance, risk management, customs, warehousing, packaging and groupage services. They can collect and share data such as sea freight tracking to every party in the supply chain.
4. Carrier: the company that physically moves the shipment on its journey. This could be, for example, a shipping line who owns container vessel the shipment sails on. Carriers need to have a link to the freight forwarder to share data on the shipment and its journey.
5. Warehouse: the team who will receive and store the shipment on behalf of the buyer.  A good sea freight tracking tool will provide them with accurate data on when the products will arrive, the quantity etc. so they can manage their warehouse space and manpower accordingly.

So how can you keep track of all of these parties, provide them with the information they need, or notify them if something doesn’t go to plan? Complete sea freight tracking solutions such as myHillebrandGori lets you collaborate effortlessly with all the involved parties in one place, giving updates on your shipments and managing any problems.

More than simply sea freight tracking

International shipping and global supply chains are complex. Using an end-to-end shipping freight forwarder like Hillebrand Gori, you get so much more than just location data for your shipments.

Find information on where your cargo is, which port it is heading to, route changes, delays, the condition of your cargo, customs clearance problems, as well as all of your records, documentation and paperwork in the app, all of your supply chain partners, invoices and more.

So if you want to know more than simply if your order will be delivered on time, take a look at the myHillebrandGori app or contact us for a free shipping quote.