How a leading carrier achieved optimal utilisation and competitive pricing using AI

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Context

Post-COVID, a leading global carrier, was finding that their customers were increasingly shopping around for SPOT rates. As a result they struggled to fill their sailings, resulting in low vessel utilisation. 


In response, their sales and operations teams decided to review rates more frequently, taking into account remaining available market capacity and space on each sailing. However, this rate setting process was both labour-intensive and prone to mispricing with rates sometimes set too high or too low relative to the market.

Challenge

The carrier encountered three challenges in setting competitive rates:

1. In attempt to win business, lowering rates periodically led to offering rates below the market norm and lost margin
2. Manually reviewing and adjusting rates to include current remaining capacity took substantial time and effort
3. Customers were shopping for competitive rates across multiple carriers, leading to suboptimal vessel utilisation

Solution

By deploying Solvo.ai’s AI driven price optimisation capability,  the carrier was able to generate rates tailored to their needs and operational goals, shifting from a manual rate setting to an automated, API delivered workflow. 


 Key features included:

• Optimised selling rates for multiple lanes that considered market volatility and customers booking behaviour.
• Automatically daily adjusted rates through tracking utilisation and remaining available capacity
• Speedily re-issued rates as market conditions shift, either through manual or automatic triggering, based on market intelligence

Impact

Through offering competitive rates to their customers,  the carrier was able to achieve their vessel utilisation targets and improve revenue.

Solvo.ai’s solution has allowed the carrier to:

• Reduce manual effort by obtaining automated daily adjustments based on their current capacity
• Specify and update utilisation targets, linking their pricing process to their operations
• Integrate selling rate recommendations directly into their existing processes

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“We saw potential in using Solvo.ai to support smarter short term pricing — especially when trying to maintain utilisation on historically volatile trades. It allows us to be more proactive.”  - SVP, Global Head of Revenue Management (Top 5 Ocean Carrier)