Hazcheck Systems - Dangerous Goods Software

Hazcheck Online: CASE STUDY - Freight Forwarder

Based in Antwerp this large freight forwarding company specialises in consolidation cargo for shippers in the Benelux region. Of their annual 1200 teu output 25% contain dangerous goods. Often when consolidating containers up to 40 single dangerous goods items may require to be loaded in the same container from several different chemical producers.

Previous working practice

The freight forwarding company had 1 dedicated hazardous cargo co-ordinator who was responsible for ensuring that all dangerous items were loaded and sent to the relevant shipping line correctly. In one such shipment the co-ordinator had to validate 32 separate dangerous goods items of varying classes from several different shippers to be loaded in the same container. The haz co-ordinator needed to manually check:

Each item's entry in the IMDG code including packing, physical state and concentrations

Segregation of all UN numbers and class

Specific segregation against chemical families, 12 of the items had specific chemical groups as per section 3.1.4.4 of the IMDG Code

Submission of the request to the shipping line by email

Completion of the DGN

By referring to the IMDG code manually this process took the following amount of time:

30 minutes

45 minutes

1 hour 30 minutes (including consultation with shippers to check chemical groups)

1 hour

30 minutes

Total time taken for complete validation was 4 hours and 15 minutes. Bookings often miss the intended sailing because the request was sent to the shipping line for approval after the hazardous deadline cut-off.

The Hazcheck Solution

By using Hazcheck Online the freight forwarder has the ability to automatically undertake all steps above with no re-keying of any of the dangerous goods details necessary in the completion of the email sent to the shipping line and completion of the dangerous goods note. Using Hazcheck Online to validate the load it took the following amount of time:

Steps 1-3: 1 hour (including consultation with shippers regarding chemical groups)

Steps 4-5: 10 minutes

Total time taken for automatic validation using Hazcheck Online was 1 hour 10 minutes, using 1 Hazcheck validation unit at a cost of US$1.75. Bookings made the deadline for the specific sailings.

Productivity gains over a week using Hazcheck Online

The freight forwarding company on average has 5-6 hazardous consolidations per week with an average of 32 dangerous goods items in each. Using the above times as a reference validating each item manually would take 8 minutes. Therefore to validate dangerous goods manually each week it took a total of 1,536 minutes (25.6 hours).

By applying the same principle as above using Hazcheck Online we get a figure of 2.2 minutes per item, and a figure of 422.4 minutes (7 hours).

Overall Productivity Gain: 18.6 hours per week

Exis Technologies are systems developers of the Computerised IMDG Code for the International Maritime Organization