Customer Success Story – F&B

Freshco is a New Zealand-based export business that has been in operation since 1989. It has orchards, packing houses, cool stores, and offices in various growing locations throughout the country. The company offers a full suite of services for its customers, including harvesting, packing, cool storage, shipping, and marketing. Freshco also has joint ventures with key apple growers in Nelson and squash growers in Gisborne and Hawkes Bay, exporting over 15,000 tonnes of squash annually. Each year, the company ships over 4,000 TEU container equivalents to its global customers. As the majority of their shipments are done through Ocean Freight, Freshco uses both Real-Time Container Tracking and Predictive Visibility solutions by Portcast.

What Issues Were They Facing?

Prior to using Portcast, Freshco was manually tracking each shipment to ensure that customers were informed by email. As a result of the lack of transhipment data, the company was unable to provide customers with concrete reasons for the lack of/unreliable data, leading to frustrated customers. Furthermore, the lack of visibility during disruption was having a major impact on customer service. The company was unable to filter all the China shipments and see that they hadn't been Gated Out yet, causing further problems for customers.

What Was the Impact of Portcast’s Real-Time Visibility?

Portcast Real-time ocean visibility is important for Freshco because it allows them to track the shipment of their products in real-time, so they can have better control over the quality of their products and delivery times. Additionally, it allows them to monitor their supply chain more closely, helping their team to identify any potential issues and make adjustments quickly. This helps to ensure the freshness of their products and that they meet customer expectations.

Portcast has been providing invaluable service to Freshco, helping them navigate the new normal of disruptions and ensuring customer service levels remain high. They have been proactively notifying Freshco's importers ahead of the customer so they can build better partnerships with the end customer. Portcast sends a weekly auto-generated Alerts report from the Freshco system on a weekly basis, to update the operational team on any shipment delays and exceptions to look out for, allowing them to make data-informed decisions. The Alert notifications provided by Portcast have given Freshco a call to action, helping them to proactively prioritize what shipments to action upon straight away.

On top of that, with Portcast's Control Dashboard, they have access to a consolidated view of the latest shipment dwell times at their fingertips and are able to incorporate this information into their day-to-day processes to guarantee seamless operations.

Through Portcast’s real-time container tracking, Freshco has seen a 1.5X return on their investment, just from saving on tedious manual monitoring.

"Really happy with the Control Dashboard, it’s bang on, shows us exactly what we need" General Manager of Operations at Freshco.

Portcast Real-Time and Predictive Visibility Platform

We aggregate, standardise and enrich container tracking data from over 70 sources to provide you with a single source of truth. Our system detects risks and also explains the key reason for the delays so you can get a full picture of all your containers, easily.

Interested in learning more about our product? Get in touch with us for a demo today.