PT Salam Pacific Indonesia Lines (SPIL), a major regional ocean carrier in Indonesia providing reliable inter-island shipment throughout the archipelago, today announced they have joined TradeLens, a blockchain-enabled digital shipping platform, jointly developed by A.P. Moller – Maersk and IBM.
The announcement follows the Indonesia Directorate General Customs and Excise office’s recent announcement that it would join TradeLens as well. The move is expected to give SPIL customers a richer experience by providing larger international access in addition to the ability to book, track shipments, or set-up finance payments using mySPIL, a mobile application that eases booking services.
TradeLens helps enable more efficient and accurate container tracking and information sharing among platform members. The TradeLens platform digitizes formerly paper-based shipping processes, resulting in instantaneous and immutable end-to-end data.
SPIL has been actively engaged in digital transformation throughout its organization, from client facing operations all the way to its strong back-end as required by its customers who demand accessibility and services to monitor their container shipments. This transformation started with the implementation of a new booking experience for its customers, the development of mySPIL apps and a new web portal to attract better customer experience, and grow to the need of having larger global access services.
Tan Wijaya, President Director of IBM Indonesia said “Learning the need of SPIL’s ongoing transformation, we believe that TradeLens and the implementation of blockchain technology in various forms will benefit all stakeholders in the entire logistics ecosystem and drive the modernization of trade at all levels, which is SPIL’s core business. Blockchain adoption can help businesses to redefine their relationships in the market through increased trust, transparency, and newfound collaboration.”
Mr Yudi Mulyawan, Chief Technology Officer PT SPIL said “Digitalization in the logistic business is no longer ‘good to have’, but it is now an essential part of our business processes. All our customer touchpoints are now digitalized, and joining TradeLens allows us to merge our platform together for a much wider customer base, enabling a complete end-to-end digital transaction.”
Mike White, CEO GTD Solutions and Head of TradeLens said “With SPIL joining TradeLens, shippers from the region can gain access to the breadth of an ecosystem which spans the entire global logistics industry from customs authorities and agents to international and regional carriers. The flow of reliable, trustworthy information plus the TradeLens platform’s ability to address core pain points through digitization and the replacement of paper-based processes is helping drive an industry-wide transformation.”
More than $16 trillion USD worth of goods are shipped across international borders each year, with some 80 percent transported by the ocean shipping industry where SPIL play its role. Paper-based procedures cause a number of pain points felt throughout the global supply chain, including inconsistent and inaccurate information, delays and disruptions (due to manual checking and data input), the inability to provide thorough risk assessments, the promotion of complex, inefficient and costly stakeholder communication, and a lack of transparency.
The scope of the TradeLens platform now extends to more than half of the world’s ocean container cargo and the ecosystem now includes more than 160 participants.