TMO Global Logistics currently provides cargo tracking services that rely on clients calling the TMO office to request estimated time of arrivals (ETAs) and TMO employees calling shipping dispatchers to find current cargo locations and relaying experience-based ETAs to the client. For TMO, minimizing the resources (dollars, man-hours, data storage space, and bandwidth) spent accepting ETA requests, calculating ETAs, and relaying results can free those resources for use on other tasks. At the same time, if TMO can provide its clients with more accurate ETAs retrievable in less time, relative to competitors, the firm stands to gain significant market share as a result of these attractive services. The team considered issues such as accuracy of the data, ease of implementation, resource usage, and client privacy of the solution. The recommended solution analyzes a particular route's historical shipment data and segments each trip into legs that might be used, in conjunction with legs from other shipments also stored for future historical analysis, to reconstruct hypothetical trips and calculate a more accurate ETA than simply using initial and terminal points would permit. To further increase the reliability of the calculation, legs with similar start- and endpoints (within a critical radius of the actual leg's start- and/or endpoints) are also used in the calculation. The project team anticipates integrating this ETA approach into TMO Global Logistics' cargo tracking system. The revamped system includes a TMO client interface that maps the client's cargo for added customer satisfaction and a TMO administrator interface to initialize, and if necessary, manually adjust shipments.
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