Blume Global, a provider of logistics and supply chain solutions, recently announced Blume Street Turns, a solution to optimize drayage operations and container utilization through the use of machine learning algorithms.

Blume Street Turns improves driver and truck utilization and increases turns while reducing congestion and CO2 emissions around ports and rail ramps. Blume Street Turns matches incoming imports with outgoing exports around marine terminals and outbound with inbound moves around rail ramps. The company’s ecosystem of ocean freight forwarders, ocean carriers, dray carriers and intermodal marketing companies provides a large volume of outbound and inbound moves significantly increasing the opportunity for street turns.       

In addition to matching outbound with inbound moves for dray carriers, Blume supports using the same domestic or ISO marine container for the outbound and inbound moves. For example, a dray carrier can match an outbound move of a 53’ domestic container from a rail ramp in Chicago to a distribution center in Indianapolis with an inbound move from Fort Wayne back to Chicago. The dray carrier will request approval from the IMC. Once approved, the dray carrier will execute the move saving time and gas costs while reducing CO2 emission and congestion around the rail ramp. The exact same scenario applies for import and export operations around marine terminals where dray carriers request approval from steamship lines.

Street Turns is available immediately as part of Blume’s Asset Optimization suite which also includes:

• Intelligent Container Selection: forecasts demand and supply of containers at origin and destination locations enabling IMC’s and domestic container owners to select between private container, pooled domestic container or pooled ISO/marine container for each move.
• Domestic Reload: enables steamship lines to reduce or eliminate the cost of returning containers from inland ports, via rail, by allowing IMCs and other domestic shippers to use the ISO/marine container for a domestic move.                         

“Traditionally, street turns are manual and difficult to coordinate, but with Blume Global, customers can enact a higher level of automation allowing for full optimization of the user’s network,” said Pervinder Johar, CEO of Blume Global. “The Blume Street Turn solution provides a competitive advantage by allowing customers to leverage decades of market leadership in international and domestic multi-modal logistics, as well as an established network of the largest ocean carriers, over 300 IMCs and thousands of drayage companies with our digital operating platform.”

About Blume Global

From the world’s largest global retailers, manufacturers and consumer products companies to the smallest owner-operator drayage trucking companies, success depends on end-to-end visibility and orchestration of global supply chain networks. Every move. Every mode. Every mile. With its AI-enabled, data-driven digital operating platform and solutions for supply chain orchestration, real-time visibility, logistics execution, asset management, optimization and financial audit & settlement, Blume Global leverages more than 25 years of data insights, its globally connected network, and advanced technologies to help enterprises be more agile and responsive, improve service delivery and reduce costs.