National freight hub to deliver efficiency

Australian ports are looking to tap into the power of data via the National Freight Data Hub, to gain greater visibility regarding where freight is and how to move it more efficiently around the country.

The federal government will pull togethter data from a range of freight and logistics sources, including ports, to make the sector more efficient. Picture: Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications

Data is the lifeblood of many industries, which draw on analytics to reduce costs, increase efficiency and deliver better service to customers, and the sea freight sector is no exception.

Australian ports are looking to tap into the power of data to gain greater visibility regarding where freight is and how to move it more efficiently around the country.

The National Freight Data Hub aims to be what the government calls “a federated data sharing network of freight knowledge”.

The project, to which the federal government has committed $16.5m over four years, will pull together data from a range of freight and logistics sources, including ports, to help the make the freight sector more efficient and resilient.

The hub, which is overseen by the Infrastructure Department, has three aims: to improve strategic planning for infrastructure and transport network investment and other decisions; to improve the capture and sharing of freight data to support day to day operations; and to evaluate how the freight system is performing and what actions can be taken to improve it.

“Establishing a hub as a trusted source of national freight data will provide a national picture of critical information to keep freight moving, such as where roadworks are occurring or the impact of congestion,” the Department of Infrastructure says.

“It will also support container tracking to manage biosecurity and dangerous goods risks, forecast freight demand and provide insights into port performance.”

Ports Australia chief executive Mike Gallacher says the issue of collecting and collating data will become more pressing in the future.

“It is a significant investment that most Australians won’t see, other than it will come down to the consumer level where people won’t be waiting months and months, as they currently are, for their lounge coming from some part of the world, not being able to be told where it is and when it’s going to be here,” Gallacher says.

“And it’s going to make it a lot easier for logistics companies to actually plan for rises and falls in freight and making sure they’ve got sufficient labour available to deal with the highs and the lows, and therefore it will make the country more efficient in our ability to move freight around the nation.”

Several state port authorities are currently working on their own data collation projects and these need to be co-ordinated nationally, Gallacher says.

“We keep saying that the national government through the Transport and Infrastructure COAG Group need to take leadership of this,” he says.

“We cannot have, as we’ve had with Covid, states doing their own thing, because then you have questions about interoperability across the entire supply chain.

“It’s extremely important that all, both state and federal governments, work co-operatively to maximise the true potential of such a system.”

NSW Ports chief executive Marika Calfas – who was on the expert panel for the federal government Inquiry into National Freight and Supply Chain Priorities that recommended the logistics data be collated – described the National Freight Hub as a work in progress.

“It’s going to be evolving,” Calfas says.

“It was to start off with some information and then evolve it and add to it, rather than waiting years to get a whiz-bang, all the information in it.

“It will have small wins. But it’s really just a first phase of a broader suite of information.”

Ports NSW has been using data to determine why shippers build up an excess of empty containers and to ensure the problem won’t recur, because they are expensive to store and there is limited storage space.

It has been measuring the load to discharge ratio, which shows how many containers are loaded on ships leaving the port and how many are unloaded from ships arriving. It can then get an idea of when an oversupply is going to build up and put pricing incentives in place for shipping companies to remove them.

Calfas says that long-term, the data from disparate sources across the supply chain will need to be brought together.

“There’s a lot of data captured by different parts of the supply chain and it’s a very fragmented system with lots of players,” she says.

“But not all of the data is connected. So you can only really interpret some pieces, you can only really interpret things on the data that you have access to.”

While it is working with the National Freight Data Hub, Fremantle Port has also put together its own supply chain intelligent data hub.

The idea arose at the height of the pandemic last year when global supply chains ground to a halt.

“With the data that we had at the port, we were able to quickly put together a data hub that identified all our imports and exports from the point of view of origin and destination, and therefore identified as the essential items,” says Dominique Thatcher, digital leader logistics solutions at Fremantle Port.

“That kind of information provides you with the ability to anticipate what’s coming towards you and consequently optimise your supply chain. That’s done through transparency and that visibility.”

Road transport companies can draw on the data to determine the best time to arrive at the port to load containers, thereby minimising waiting time and associated costs.

Telematic data on containers can also show the road routes it is taking when it leaves the ports, and increase the efficiency of those journeys and minimise the impact on local communities.

“It’s a big deal because it really touches a lot of those supply chain efficiency aspects that are managed by road authorities, local government, exporters, importers and of course the impact on the community,” Thatcher says.

“By understanding where and when those channels are under­utilised, we can influence and incentivise the transport industry to optimise those opportunities and minimise the impact on the community from a noise congestion, traffic and potential accidents.”

The Port of Brisbane also supports the development of the National Freight Data Hub.

“Developing a hub that could share such data securely, without compromising commercial confidentiality would be valuable to ports, who are focused on working with all operators and stakeholders to ensure the movement of freight within and through ports is done as efficiently and as safely as possible,” Port of Brisbane interim chief executive Neil Stephens says.