Global Transportation Providers APL; OHL; COSCO - Essay Example

OHL OHL is one of the largest third party logistic services providers in the world. It provides supply chain management services to top organizations of the world. Its services include transportation, custom brokerage, warehousing etc. Its tracking system is one of the most sophisticated in the world. Its shipment tracking system is based on GPS and EDI shipment tracking system and offer real time tracking system. OHL also does not provide facility to track the shipments online from any web browser whereas APL provides such facility.

COSCO COSCO is relatively young company with over 25 years of experience in the industry. It uses an innovative and new technology to track its shipments. It serves mostly Asian markets including Japan, rest of Asia, North America and Europe. It manages IRIS-2 system which helps to manage its shipment tracking. It is considered as one of the most sophisticated systems in the industry. Advantages & Disadvantages One of the most important advantages of shipment tracking system for any transportation firm is the fact that it provides the company necessary flexibility as well as depth and breadth to mange cargos on large scales.

Though most of the systems used by modern shipping companies are technology based therefore they enjoy the necessary advantages due to their technological superiority. As for as the system of APL is concerned, it is considered as one of the highly sophisticated and state of art system. In its essence, this is wireless system based on RFID. APL attaches RFID tags to most of its shipments to track their shipments. (Cox, 2006). However, the real draw back of this system is the fact the tags need to past certain posts in order to located therefore if a new container replaces another one the it may take a bit longer for the system to accurately give the real time location of the shipments based on their time.

It is also important to understand that APL is also using WAVES which is based on a very complex technology which provides a much greater advantage over its competitors because it is not used by any other transportation firms in the world. This propriety use of a very complex and sophisticated system provide necessary competitive advantage. The shipment tracking system of OHL is a bit old and is considered as less sophisticated than APL. Based on GPS and EDI, this system is bit slower especially in terms of downloading the data from the real time location to the servers of the firm therefore accurate tracking takes slightly higher than other systems such as with APL.

COSCO's system is supported by Sybase Inc. Sybase is one of the highly regarded company in terms of producing robust and sophisticated systems. COSCO adapted "Sybase's Adaptive Server Enterprise, Replication Server, Open Client and jConnect in its IRIS-2 System for data collection, storage, conversion, processing and analysis" (Connolly, 2008). The system employed by COSCON is much more sophisticated than the systems at APL and OHL. It not only provides a much more comprehensive tracking of the shipments but also enable COSCON to analyze the data on real time basis.

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