The GT Nexus Shipper Council, a community group of supply chain executives representing large global enterprises, has recognized Hapag-Lloyd, one of the world’s leading container liner shipping companies, as the winner of the 2019 Ocean Performance Award. The award will be presented at this year’s Transpacific Maritime Conference (TPM 2019), being held March 3-6 in Long Beach, Calif.

Hapag-Lloyd operates a fleet of 222 modern container ships and a total capacity of 2.6 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU). The company has approximately 12,500 employees at 394 sites in 127 countries. Hapag-Lloyd has a container fleet of 1.6 million TEU, including one of the world’s largest and most state-of-the-art reefer fleets. One-hundred-and-twenty liner services worldwide ensure fast, reliable connections between all the continents. Hapag-Lloyd is one of the leading operators in the Atlantic, Latin America, and Intra Americas trades.

“The Shipper Council has a long and proud history of driving data quality improvement and raising the bar for the entire industry,” said Siva Narayanan, Director, International Ops & Warehousing at Solvay, and current Shipper Council Chairperson. “We were extremely pleased to expand our scope of recognition this year to account for timeliness of status messages, for the first time. We looked at the percent of messages transmitted within 24 hours of the actual event occurrence. The new metric adds a valuable dimension to evaluating partner performance and overall contribution to a shipper’s goals for actionable, end-to-end supply chain visibility.”

Tracking industry metrics for data quality and timeliness will spark further focus on near- and real-time data for supply chain operations, versus capabilities for after-the-fact analysis.

“Our customers face headwinds on multiple fronts, many of which are beyond the industry’s control,” said Joachim Timm, Director of Digital Channels at Hapag-Lloyd. “But one thing we can control is the quality and timeliness of data we deliver to our customers and thereby add additional value to their day-to-day decision making. The Shipper Council rallies around this challenge and raises expectations for performance across the entire industry. We are proud of our leadership role within the shipping community, and we are very pleased to be once again recognized by our customers with this prestigious award. It truly validates the effort we’ve put forth to assist our customers in becoming more data-driven.”

Shipper Council member companies all use GT Nexus as a common cloud technology platform to run their global supply chains. This enables the Shipper Council to measure and benchmark against the collective industry performance. Improvements by any single member benefit the entire community. The work of the group has moved the industry average data quality score to above 95% across the top 20 ocean carriers representing over 90% of global capacity.