Owing to service and performance challenges in the rail sector over the past six years, there is increased demand by shippers and carriers alike for greater supply chain visibility (SCV). The goal of greater visibility is to track goods movement from origin to destination to improve and strengthen supply chain performance through greater sharing of information on freight flows and network performance. Having access to timely information on the location and performance of assets (such as rail cars) plays a key part in informing shippers on how the system is performing and where problems may be arising that may require action or discussion.
The Vancouver-Fraser Port Authority’s Supply Chain Visibility Project (SCVP) is a joint venture between the port authority and Transport Canada and was launched in 2015. The goal of the project was to develop and track objective measures of supply chain performance for bulk cargo moving to and from the port in hopes of more effectively identifying infrastructure bottlenecks, improving decisions on infrastructure investment, and optimizing operations.
One of the main challenges to good SCV is the collection and dissemination of traffic and performance information. Ideally, information would be collected from all market participants (shippers, carriers and terminal operators) and shared in a transparent fashion. This has been a difficult undertaking to manage in practice as these traffic and performance data are commercially valuable and sensitive and tend to be overly drawn from the freight railways, which possess advanced information management systems. Having a third-party provider of performance data allows independent compilation of performance data and measures that can be shared with shippers and carriers and bring additional insight to the parties as they take part in important discussions on improving the performance of the supply chains.
