The success of shifting work to inland ports depends on on-time delivery performance of 95% along the distribution chain, while railroad standards are much lower.
Ocean carriers are offering a menu of new services to improve the supply chain efficiency and reduce the cost of delivering cargo from Asia to U.S. inland destinations, shipping executives told The Journal of Commerce’s Inland Ports conference.
Some of the strategies are purely operational. Maersk Line, for example, attempts to coordinate the unloading of imported containers at inland destinations with the reloading of the empty containers with export cargo for the return trip to Asia.