Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Andre, I'm not sure I need to ask you a question. I think I can just go. Trusting Container Shipping, Please discuss.
I think Pauan set up the perfect pivot. You chaired the DCSA, the Digital Container Shipping association for seven years and spent 15 years on Intra's board.
From that perspective, where's the blocks on progress in terms of shipping, in terms of trust, visibility, standards?
[00:00:30] Speaker B: Well, actually it's funny, Mike, the way you mentioned that I was listening to Pawan with a lot of interest because of course we've been dealing with Intra and E2open and Wisetech for years. But one of the reasons that I really pushed with Maersk at the time for the DCSA was because of the 15 years at Intra.
I knew that when at Intra we created standards in 2001, 2002.
[00:00:57] Speaker A: Just explain what Intra did for anyone who's not familiar with it. Sure.
[00:01:00] Speaker B: Intra was, let's say the first. We called it an E business platform, but there wasn't actually any business. It was an E commerce, I don't know, E sharing platform for, essentially for bookings and shipping instructions, developing a standard format that everybody could use and more or less understand each other. So that was the goal.
At the same time we started to create standards. So I think that was, it was a positive way forward. But in the 20 odd years of intra, there wasn't that many standards being developed simply because nobody probably thought it was of any interest.
So when we created dcsa, there the goal was we have been doing this for 20, 25 years now. We need a solution. We need to create these standards to help us create a foundation where people can build solutions and speak the same language.
So I think you were asking me if that was progress or what's blocking progress. I think we've progressed somewhat and again, the tech is not the issue.
It's really about adoption and as Paula is saying, about trust.
Trust in sharing information, trust in adopting standards to share that information.
Sometimes it's a vicious circle. So seven years with DCSA taught me one thing, is that getting fierce competitors to agree on basic definitions was hard, but it was feasible. But getting the adoption I think is another story. And that's the difficult task that DCSA has today.
And again, without common standards, everyone could have visibility, but they're not necessarily looking at the same thing. And we still don't get predictability, which I think is still the talk of the town. This is what customers want.
[00:02:55] Speaker A: Let's look at predictability from the technology perspective we were discussing earlier, which took me back in time to my own formative years as well. You were telling me about when you first started at msc, container positions were up on cards on a wall. And I remember in my family's trucking business, you know, there'd be like a blackboard. And now we've got all this real time tracking AI networks. But is there a different way of working now or is it really the same people doing sort of something similar, but it's sort of dressed up as modern.
Where is 40 years of technology taken us?
[00:03:31] Speaker B: And the answer to your question is yes, we moved of course, from these physical cards on the wall to let's call it semi real time digital tracking. I think that works for everything. Mostly relying on edi, by the way. Still today, still edi, yeah. Oh yeah, still. Well, you have smart containers, of course, that, you know, provide their location and sometimes what they're doing.
But because SWAT containers are still have a very low penetration, it's not yet something you can actually use.
And the thing is, as soon as an exception hits, what do people do? They just pick up the phone again, write an email or open some offline spreadsheet that was updated three weeks ago. You were talking about updating rates and things like that.
So digital transformation.
And that's something that I've tried to work on for the past couple of years. It's not about just buying new software and it's really still and always will be about getting people to break all these habits and as both of you mentioned, to redesign the processes.
And that's a tough process with or without AI.
[00:04:49] Speaker A: Well, okay, on AI then.
Are you seeing similarities with this to the blockchain evangelists of 10 years ago? Or is AI different? Do you think
[00:05:03] Speaker B: it's funny because the Blockchain Evangelists of 10 years ago are the same or some of the same people. AI evangelists of today, they're the vendors
[00:05:13] Speaker A: Nada was talking about. Watch out for them.
[00:05:16] Speaker B: But the funny thing is you'd get, 10 years later, the people would contact me and say, oh, I'd like to have a talk with you. When I was with the company, and I would say, but don't you remember you already talked to me eight years ago about blockchain and what have you been up to? And so blah, blah, blah, blah.
[00:05:32] Speaker A: He now wants you to buy it in crypto.
[00:05:34] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly, exactly. And well, some colleagues do that, but so for me it's relatively simple. I mean, you know, show me where any technology can solve a problem, right? If we have a problem to solve.
But don't show me another demo.
Don't show me another, you know, 3, 300 slide PowerPoint. If you can take a simple routine exception away from an operations person, for example, or, you know, read documents without somebody typing everything in again, then I'm interested. Otherwise, we've all seen this movie before and we're not going to be able to benefit from a lot of this new tech until we fix the underlying processes and look at documents. How many companies have come to us in the past, I keep saying us to MSC, in the past 30 years, we'll read all your documents for you. Well, nobody succeeded. So you still got people reeking and reeking and wreaking.
I can give you an anecdote. And this has to do with intra, actually. So you back Wisetech E2 open intra.
One day my boss, the big boss of the company, calls me up to his office and he says, oh, we're meeting somebody from Maersk today, somebody that I still talk to today. And I said, okay. So we had this meeting and they explained to us what they were trying to do creating the E business platform. And so I listened, I listened very carefully. And I was a bit of a techie still. Long hair, coffee, smoking, of course. And so I was writing, taking notes, and the guy leaves, you know, bye, bye, great seeing you. And the boss says to me, what do you think? And I said, boss, what is edi? And you know, we don't have all that. We just have simple databases.
And the boss said to me, then let's do it. And it's thanks to that meeting that we actually got into modernizing what we were doing and a little bit the way we were working.
But the truth is we haven't changed much in the way we work. And when I say we, I think it's everybody, you know, in the ecosystem, maybe a few are a bit more modern, but that's where we are. So let's do AI blockchain.
Trying to think of another one.
[00:07:52] Speaker A: But your general point is that shipping does need more technology.
It's implementation, I think, and adoption.
[00:08:02] Speaker B: Sorry, did I interrupt you, Paul?
[00:08:03] Speaker A: I was saying implementation and adoption.
[00:08:06] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I mean, especially on the standard side, if we don't have, if we don't get adoption and you know, you take for example, the E bill of lading, which is something MSC and myself, we pushed a lot during COVID If you still only have 10, 15, 20% of original bills that are E bills, then you don't have critical mass, so you cannot change your processes.
[00:08:29] Speaker A: And well, that's been a slow adopter, though, hasn't it? E bills of lading.
[00:08:34] Speaker B: It's been a slow adopter, and not because it's not useful, but because it's not enough.
Because, you know, if you look at.
Okay, you can also blame the banks, but it's not really true anymore. If you look at the pile of documents you need for a shipment, you take out the bill of lading, you've taken out the title of property, but you still have all the other documents. So now the work is on getting all these other documents digitalized and having them being authorized and accepted by the different regulators that need to accept them.
So that's part of the work in progress with dcsa. For example,
