The Portcast Global Transit Times dashboard is a helpful tool to help you analyze the historical evolution of global container transit times and understand the reliability of global carrier’s provided transit time vs actual transit time. It can also be a good indication of global disruption

Contrary to the Transit Times dashboard, which only includes your own Org’s containers, the Global Transit Times includes all tracked containers in the Portcast platform for a wider view of the supply chain’s reliability.

What constitutes Global Transit Times and underlying reliability scores?

The Global Transit Times dashboard is based on the fundamental comparison between a couple of major concepts in ocean visibility:

• Carrier transit time: the difference between the carrier’s Estimated Time of Departure (ETD) and Arrival (ETA). This is the time the carrier estimates it will take to get from the Port of Loading and Port of Discharge.
• Actual transit time: the difference between the (observed) Actual Time of Departure (ATD) and Arrival (ATA). This is the actual time it took the vessel(s) to complete the container voyage between POL and POD.

Typically, there is a gap between what the carriers estimate will be the time it takes to complete the voyage, and what it actually takes. This difference can be, in many cases, quite substantial, and can impact multiple aspects of logistics operations. So, when planning, it is important to understand the concept of carrier and lane reliability.

This is basically the process of comparing the carrier estimations and the observed reality in terms of transit times, and establishing how reliable these estimations really are. The less difference delta between both, the best this reliability score will be, and the more reliable the planning process can be.

In the Global Transit Times dashboard, Portcast calculates a percentage-based reliability score that is used to ascertain the lane reliability between POL and POD. This is the score we’ll see displayed on the visualizations available in this dashboard.

What features are available in the Global Transit Times Dashboard?

Reliability Score evolution chart

By default, the Global Transit Times dashboard looks at all the containers that are tracked via the Portcast platform and establishes the aggregate, global reliability. This can be interpreted as a ‘global reliability’ score. Typically, when large disruptions to the supply chain occur (for example, the Suez Canal incident), you might see this global reliability score vary importantly. This can indicate a major disruption in the supply chain.

Example chart of global reliability scores, unfiltered.

The first visualization chart in the dashboard is, therefore, the reliability score evolution chart. This feature enables you to see the score for different month/year pairs, based on the previously described reliability score.

You can use the filters on the dashboard to go beyond the aggregate, global score though. Portcast allows you to filter by the following criteria:

• Container arrival date at POD: the date filter that applies to the displayed chart. This is obviously only applicable after arrival at POD, since no reliability scores can be established before this happens.
• POL and POD locations: the ports of departure and arrival. This allows you to filter by specific lanes and understand how their specific reliability looks like. For example, if you are trying to understand how does transit time reliability looks for voyages between Shanghai and Singapore, you can set these ports as POL and POD and understand reliability for that lane specifically.