50,000 trackers at sea
There is a plethora of discussions concerning the technical details of container trackers in the maritime shipping industry. CMA CGM is now going the whole hog and deploying Traxens trackers on all of its 50,000 containers; Maersk and MSC are also in action.
A container that is in transit at sea can be as untraceable as a drop in the ocean. CMA CGM now wants to change that. The carrier is currently equipping more than 50,000 of its boxes with Traxens trackers, having already deployed the first such unit in 2018. We are talking specifically about a tracking device, which is called a Trax Box; it allows for the continuous tracking as well as monitoring of boxes during transport.
The Traxens device is attached to the container and provides the monitoring agency with access to four critical pieces of information. These are – the position of a container, both at sea and on land; the intensity of any shocks, depending on the cargo; the opening and closing of the doors; and external temperature variations. The carrier says that the system offers almost real-time monitoring; it reports at very short intervals.
The big three are on board
In addition to data transmitted around the clock, customers can also request the individualised evaluation of information along the supply chain, if they want to delve deeper into the analysis of the information collected. The pre-requisite is the equipment’s technical compatibility with the Traxens solution.
CMA CGM, which has held a stake in Traxens ever since 2012, it further in- creased its ownership of the software firm in 2015. The line’s conviction that Traxens has all the right answer to its information needs at sea goes far beyond Marseille, however.
MSC already became a Traxens shareholder in 2016, and Maersk also decided to take a stake recently. The three major carriers can set the technical standards with the mass of their ships and containers alone.
