DHL Global Forwarding has launched an online tracking portal that will allow customers to see real-time data on their goods in transit, viewing variables such as freight rates, offers, transport modes, and carbon emissions.
The platform, known as myDHLi, allows the firm’s freight forwarding customers to access information across organizations and trading partners, according to a webcast today by the unit, which is an arm of German parcel giant Deutsche Post DHL Group. Now including air, ocean, and customs shipments, the platform is on track to add coverage of road and rail modes in future releases.
The company is offering myDHLi free of charge for all DHL Global Forwarding customers. Interested businesses can register for onboarding, and the company is launching the product with a pilot phase for selected customers from five continents. In the meantime, the firm’s previous customer portal, DHLi, will be available until the myDHLi roll-out is complete.
DHL has been developing blocks of the new platform for months, by rolling out online services like myDHLi Quote + Book and myDHLi Analytics. The complete package includes those previous pieces, and now merges them with additional features such as myDHLi Documents, which offers access to downloadable shipment documents by establishing a single online location for storing all relevant files, such as quotes, commercial invoice, packing list, house bill, invoice, and proof of delivery.
The myDHLi portal also taps into data from DHL’s internal transportation management system (TMS) software, CargoWiseOne. That TMS product now manages 97% of DHL’s ocean freight volume and 31% of its air freight volume, with a plan to complete the roll-out to full coverage of those modes by the end of 2021, DHL executives said in the webcast.
By combining all those tools in a single platform, the new tracking service uses end-to-end information to make shipments across air and ocean visible nearly in real-time, DHL said. "Despite accelerating digitalization and super-fast connectivity, customers have a need for reduced complexity. And that is exactly what our tool does," Tim Scharwath, CEO of DHL Global Forwarding, Freight, said in a release.
"We have created a one-stop customer portal that is tailored to the needs of our customers. By combining services like online quotation and booking with shipment tracking, document accessibility, and data analyses we are creating not only 360-degree visibility, but also have laid the foundation for customers to manage their logistics," Scharwath said. "We strongly believe that digitalization bears the potential to ease and improve the daily business of shippers and freight forwarders simultaneously. This is even truer during unpredictable and challenging times such as those we are currently facing with Covid-19, and which might now act as an accelerator for digitizing the industry.”
