The Portcast platform includes a wide integration of carrier tracking that should help you track the majority of ocean shipments. However, there are inherent limitations to the tracking of ocean shipments that you still might face while using the Portcast platform that can be due to a number of issues, most of them related to how the maritime freight industry works. This guide will provide clarity relating to:

• Why ocean shipment tracking is complex and what inherent limitations there are;
• What type of errors you might encounter when tracking containers;
• How to understand status codes to better ‘read’ your container tracking information.

What are the limitations of ocean shipment visibility?

In the ocean shipment industry there are multiple players at work; but fundamentally, all of them are dependant on Ocean Carriers. These are companies that own and/or manage the actual logistics of transporting shipments from point A to point B, either completely or partially.

Many shipments actually need to be handled by more than one carrier during their voyages, depending on what the Port of Loading and Port of Destination might be. In many cases, there will not be a direct route - so transshipments might be needed, meaning that the shipment will be transferred from one carrier ship to another.

These ships can be operated by different companies; so providing a cohesive, comprehensive coverage of carrier tracking is vital to have a clear view of where a container is and what its predicted voyage will be.

Nevertheless, the quality of carrier information is variable. Some carriers offer quality information, while others provide limited updates - if any. There are also some carrier tracking particulars you should be aware of.

Limitations regarding carrier-provided information include:

• Late updates of information regarding container milestones and shipment position
• Limited backtracking of container milestones
• Limited or no public access to carrier information
• Unavailability of structured APIs to access track and trace information
• Unstable technical infrastructures
• Different modus operandi from carrier to carrier
• Unstructured tracking codes
• Unsupported carrier

Portcast’s platform does a comprehensive job of addressing most of these questions and standardizing data into one sole data source that can be easily consumed and connected to third party services via API, and also makes it available in our Web Application.