Ocean freight and customs is the part of logistics that moves goods between countries by ship, or sometimes by aeroplane, and clears them through customs at each border. Most of India's trade by weight goes by sea, in steel containers loaded at ports such as Jawaharlal Nehru Port near Mumbai, Mundra in Gujarat and Chennai.
Consider a garment exporter in Tiruppur that sends a container of T-shirts to a buyer in Germany. A truck carries the container to Chennai port. Indian customs checks the export papers. The ship sails for about four weeks to a port in Europe, and the container then clears German customs. Four kinds of organisation handle the trip, as the page on freight brokers and forwarders explains. The freight forwarder arranges the whole journey for the exporter. The shipping line owns the ship. The port loads and unloads it. Customs is the government office that checks the goods and collects any duty, the tax charged on goods that cross a border.
Each of them uses its own software. The forwarder books space on a ship and prepares the papers in freight forwarding software. Its most important paper is the bill of lading, the receipt for the goods that also proves who owns them. It is now becoming an electronic bill of lading. A customs broker files the export declaration with Indian customs through customs clearance software. At the port, a terminal operating system decides where each container waits and which crane loads it.
The ship has software of its own. The company that runs the ship plans its supplies and repairs in ship management software. Voyage optimisation chooses the route and speed that burn the least fuel. The crew sends messages, and the engine room sends its data, to the office on shore through maritime communications, over satellite links.
Urgent or valuable goods, such as medicines and phone parts, travel by air instead. At an airport, the airlines, forwarders, customs officers and cargo handlers share an air cargo community system.
A shipment still travels with dozens of documents, and many are still on paper. The change now under way is to file each document online once, and to have software read and check it. Once the container sails, the exporter can follow it through shipment tracking.