DAMCO, part of A.P. Moller – Maersk, and a provider of end-to-end supply chain management services, announced the launch of its new digital freight forwarding service into India.
The new online platform, Twill, provides greater control of shipments by offering instant price quotes and booking, transparency and tracking services, simplified paperwork and proactive customer care.
“The shipping and logistics industry today is filled with emails, phone calls and document-heavy processes which can lead to huge delays in getting quotes, a lack of flexibility to change routes mid-shipment, and a lack of transparency for customers in pricing, location data, and issue resolution,” explains Twill’s CEO Troels Stovring. “Twill, like the name suggests, is like a tightly woven fabric that consolidates different strands of the supply chain together to make shipping simple.”
As per a study by Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), the indirect costs of Indian trade accrued from unreliable transport services and regulatory delays are as high as 38-47 percent of the total logistics cost which can be reduced by 8-10 percent by digitization in the industry which will eventually boost India’s competitiveness and contribute additional revenues of up to $5.5 billion annually, according to CII’s Stimulating India’s EXIM Growth. Industry digitization is an important pillar for growth and digital innovation is vital in revolutionizing global supply-chain management.
“Resonating with the Indian government’s ‘Digital India’ initiative, we truly believe this is the right time to go live in the country, and we’re excited to be paving the way for digitization in this industry,” Stovring said.
Easy Booking
Traditionally, the quotation and booking process can take 3 to 4 business days with back and forth communication. With Twill, 80 percent of bookings are quoted and completed within 3 minutes, in just a few clicks. 30 percent of them are even done within 1 minute.
Track & Trace
Visibility is a huge priority for Twill. The platform selectively displays major milestones to customers in real time. Internally, Twill uses more than 40 milestones for the customer care team to control the operation process and be ahead of any potential exceptions.
Centralized Paperwork
Twill facilitates the document flow in the process and gives transparency. The platform has more than 5,700 documents uploaded and flowing among different parties.
24/7 Customer Care
Exceptions are unavoidable in logistics sometimes. All customers want is to be well informed and taken care of, and Twill’s operation dashboard helps to do that. Combined with Twill’s people on the ground in each country in which the platform is live, customers can rest assured that the customer care team is always on top of exceptions and have expertise to minimize any possible impact.
Twill currently serves full container load, ocean services from port to door, importing from China (including Hong Kong and Taiwan territories), India, Vietnam or Indonesia to the U.K., Spain, Benelux, Poland, Mexico, the U.S., India or the Czech Republic. Being a partner to Damco, Twill can use the company’s existing footprint across the globe as it plans to expand its services across 15 more countries by this year.
