How the Flexport Ecosystem team is helping automate global trade
By: Vivek Kishore
Tags: API, Automation, Flexport, Freight Forwarding, Integration

At 7:40 AM on Tuesday, March 23, a 400-meter-long container ship named Ever Given ran aground in the Suez Canal. It took six days and considerable resources to refloat the ship and clear the canal. This six-day blockage created a significant downstream impact, including revenue losses worth billions of dollars, delayed shipments, and a long backlog of vessels flowing through the Suez Canal.

During this time of crisis, Flexport stayed true to its mission of making global trade easy for everyone. We helped our customers with much-needed visibility, our advanced cloud-based technology platform provided them with the ability to collaborate, and our operations teams worked closely with our customers to quickly re-route Suez-bound shipments to minimize impact. However, we also ran into problems. Our customers complained that the shipment status shown on the platform was not valid and, in some cases, significantly different from actuals. Our automation didn’t work as planned, and we had to fall back to our manual processes to ensure we were providing accurate and timely information to our clients.

Lack of automation, shipment visibility, and outdated processes are profound problems across all of the global trade. Flexport is on a mission to solve these problems and make trade easy for everyone. The Flexport Ecosystem team supports this mission by making connectivity and interoperability between parties in global trade easy for everyone. We seek to bring automation in global trade by building integrations that seamlessly connect the Flexport platform with the rest of the global trade ecosystem. We do this by building best-in-class APIs, enabling a wide variety of integration tools and technologies, and building an ecosystem of connected trade applications. We are also building and supporting a strong developer community, offering supply chain consulting, and working on strategic technology partnerships.

Driving automation in global trade at scale

Trade is complex. In FY2019 alone, global port throughput was 810M containers totaling 27.5 billion cubic meters of freight capacity. An analogy here will illustrate the magnitude. This throughput is equivalent to more than 31 million Boeing 747 passenger liners, the largest passenger craft, with an internal volume of 876 cubic meters. Moving these shipments across the globe requires close coordination between multiple parties, including shippers, buyers, trucking companies, ocean carriers, air carriers, brokers, customs agencies, and port terminals. These parties need to share information, exchange documents, and manage exceptions during the shipment’s lifecycle.

Unfortunately, this process is broken, lacks automation, and is fraught with inefficiencies. Systems and applications across parties don’t talk to each other because of outdated technology, lack of enforced information exchange standards, and manual processes. To address this challenge, our team of supply chain professionals, solution engineers, and solution architects has developed in-house expertise in building seamless, secure, and scalable integrations. Flexport has also invested in a unified integration platform (iPaaS) that makes it cost-effective and fast to stitch together various systems.

While building integrations with our partners, we often find that business processes and functions are fragmented and span organizational silos. The Flexport Ecosystem team plays a critical role in facilitating these cross-functional conversations, navigating through organizational silos, and bringing multiple teams together to make integrations successful.

API-first mindset

System integration in the supply chain space has been a daunting challenge because of outdated technologies, lack of shared information exchange standards, and manual processes. And that’s why we have developed an API-first approach for our integrations. Our unique API first strategy allows us to simplify our integrations dramatically, realize the speed of building integrations, and deliver innovation at scale.

Figure 1: Our approach to integration with an API-first midset

Our APIs are purpose-built to focus on the needs universally faced by global freight forwarding, such as purchase order management, managing bookings, gaining shipment visibility, and invoicing — areas where companies need the most help and in which Flexport has developed technical expertise over the years. For example, through these APIs, our customers can send us their purchase orders, book freight, track their shipments, calculate their carbon footprint, share their customs documentation, get updates on clearing customs, get delivery notifications, and receive detailed invoices.

We are also working hard to make our services available to the broader developer community through hardened APIs and clear documentation so that anybody could use them. We are confident these APIs will create a large third-party ecosystem and enable thousands of developers and partners to build value-added services and new products for the supply chain industry.

We work closely with our customers, iterate continuously, and work in an agile fashion to make new features or enhancements available as soon as they are available. Our approach is iterative, customer-focused, and allows us to build the best solutions for our customers.

A modern approach to EDI integration

Since its inception in the early 1960s, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) has been the cornerstone of global trade. Billions of dollars worth of business transactions go through EDI every year, helping companies reduce lead time, save costs, and reduce errors. Though EDI’s were revolutionary when first introduced, they are limiting to achieve the nimbleness and agility required by today’s fast-moving supply chains. This limitation is because EDI standards diverge significantly from one organization to another, are verbose, and need to be processed in batches instead of real-time. Though outdated and limiting, EDI is here to stay, given how deeply embedded it is in the supply chain industry.

Our approach to EDI integration is to build an architecture that enables us to remain agile, nimble, and support innovation despite the constraints of traditional EDI integrations. For our partners who send us EDI messages, we wrap away existing EDI messages with RESTful APIs. This common approach for all our customers allows us to insulate the limitations of EDIs and leverage all API-led connectivity benefits such as decreased time for integration, reducing cost, and improved agility.

Direct EDI integrations between our customers’ in-house ERP systems and our platforms provide them with many capabilities resulting in increased customer satisfaction. For example, our customers can send us their purchase order information programmatically and get real-time visibility into their shipments in their in-house business applications.

Our team also works closely with the leading ocean, air, rail, and trucking carriers to build EDI integrations between their internal supply chain systems and our platform. These direct integrations provide our operations team a one-stop place, Flexport cloud platform, to exchange documents with our partners and receive shipment status directly on the platform resulting in significant operational efficiencies, improved agility, and reduced costs.

Partnering with technology providers

Our customers and supply chain partners use a variety of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and transportation management systems(TMS) to run their global supply chains. These systems have their marketplaces and app stores on which third-party developers can build and sell applications to provide extended functionality and value-added services.

We are partnering with these technology companies to build industry-leading applications on their marketplaces. For example, an out-of-box integration offering on these platforms can make it significantly easier and cheaper for our partners to integrate. Additionally, we are building multiple applications through which our partners can leverage many of our capabilities directly in their in-house technology systems.

Support engineering: the backbone of integrations

A broken integration can disrupt the entire supply chain and cause losses of millions of dollars in significant delays, lost reputation, and unhappy customers. In B2B integrations, this problem is especially hard as integrations are often impacted by changes outside an organization’s own change control boundaries. To mitigate this risk of broken integration, our support team provides 24/7 monitoring of our integrations, uses advanced analytics tools for proactive detection and triaging of potential issues, and builds robust support processes to deliver exceptional customer service.

We are focused on driving automation and leveraging the advances in technologies available. For example, our AI/ML-based anomaly detection system helps us proactively address issues related to malfunctioning integrations. Our algorithms identify integration data that deviate from normal behavior and alerts our support team, which then promptly acts on it.

We listen closely to all our internal and external stakeholders. Based on their feedback, we continue to drive improvements in our processes and tools to deliver expected customer satisfaction.

Automating the future

We have come a long way since we built our first integration in 2017. As we continue to grow, we will continue to build solutions to provide efficient, reliable, and secure data exchange between our platform and the global trade ecosystem. For the next 2–3 years, we plan to:

Carefully listen to our customers, partners, and third-party developers, and build world-class APIs to enable them to run their supply chains efficiently and, in some cases, even create new business opportunities for them

Stitch our cloud platform with all major ocean carriers, airlines, truckers, rail, and warehouses to enable our platform to provide supply chain visibility, increase operational efficiency, and enable real-time data exchange between partners

Continue to deliver business capabilities to our customers by building bespoke integrations and providing a library of standard integrations

Automate standard support processes, build advanced tools for proactive monitoring, and improve integration security over time

Want to be part of the future?

We are looking for amazing people to join our growing team for senior software engineer, API, and solution engineer roles. In your role as a solution engineer, you will be responsible for building complex data integrations and helping automate the freight forwarding industry. As a senior software engineer, API you will be owning the roadmap for our public APIs or building complex integrations with our partners.

If you enjoy working on complex problems that have the potential for a major world impact, you might be the right fit for one of our open positions.

Notes: Thanks to Nitin Goel, Victoria Angel, Megan Boughton, Tim Seit, Brian Cennamo, Eric Chung, Andrew Sturges, and Max Heinritz for reading drafts of this document and suggesting changes.