Forto has set out to revolutionise the shipping industry by making the process of sending a shipping container as easy as sending an email. This means skillfully relieving the burden of engaging with a very complex industry. We ship thousands of containers a week for hundreds of customers, on vessels bound from hundreds of Asian ports to dozens of European ports, operated by over a dozen carrier partners.
Our Hamburg based Trade Management team has a sophisticated trading strategy to balance supply and demand, and our Shanghai based Allocation Desk implements that strategy as they book a steady flow of containers from Asia to Europe. We were dissatisfied with the 3rd party systems and spreadsheets that we were using to communicate and track the work of these two important teams. It was time consuming and error prone, impacting costs and customer service.
It was suggested that a sophisticated machine learning algorithm was required to solve the problem, but when we sat down and applied simple domain modelling techniques, we found that we could build software based on the models our industry experts had in their heads all along. We’ll share with you how we iterated on the models, validating with the experts at each stage, until we produced something that reliably represents the relatively complex domain. We’ll show how we built simple solutions based on that model that have led to significant operational savings, increased profitability and improved customer experience.
For more than 20 years, I have been crafting simple solutions to complex problems, and leading teams in high-trust, high-growth environments.Currently based in the Netherlands.
