Handling multi-party complexities in container flows in the upstream oil and gas supply chain: Potential lessons for an application to intercontinental container supply chains

The LogisticsHub is an event tracking solution to manage information of cargo carrying units (CCUs) and their content along the upstream oil and gas supply chain. The main objective is to facilitate the best possible flow of information between the companies in the oil and gas sector related to offshore upstream oil exploration and production activities. The LogisticsHub uses the EPCIS (Electronic Product Code Information Service) standard by GS1 for tracking events and for creating dashboard applications accessing the data. In the first version the focus is on tracking CCUs (cargo container units), while in the second version also the content of the containers will be tracked. The increased visibility enables enhanced performance of actors along the chain. In this paper we show how the overall complexity of multi-party information flows is reduced by the introduction of hubs, and how this contribute to improve performance of the supply chain as a whole and for each actor. Each actor in the supply chain generates tracking data into the LogisticsHub in a push fashion. The data enables the parties to evaluate their performance based on actual location data, and enhances the resilience of the supply chain. Based on lessons from the early stages of the EPIM LogisticsHub solution we evaluate the relevance of this design in a more general intercontinental container supply chain setting. The LogisticsHub solution is contrasted with the data pipeline concept being based on a pull approach to gather tracking data. The data pipeline has been developed under the recent EU-funded Cassandra project.