By: Yanzhi Hu, NYSHEX Managing Director, Asia
For all the talk about “digital transformation,” the same issues continue to plague ocean shipping — rolled cargo, missed allocations, and constant disputes over who lived up to their deal.
Behind every headline about automation or AI lies the same old story: service commitments aren’t being kept. The industry faces two root causes — misaligned incentives and poor planning and execution. Until both are solved, digital tools alone won’t move the needle on reliability.
Problem #1: Misaligned Incentives
When freight rates swing, behavior follows. Shippers divert cargo to cheaper options, and carriers prioritize higher-paying freight.
The result? Broken commitments, frustrated customers, and eroded trust — not because anyone intends to breach a contract, but because the incentives themselves are misaligned.
Digitalization can streamline processes, but it can’t fix economics. As long as one side benefits from breaking a commitment, the cycle of unreliability continues.
NYFI — The Foundation for Market Transparency and Incentive Alignment
The New York Freight Index (NYFI) changes this equation by introducing trusted, independent visibility into market rates. It provides a standardized benchmark that reflects actual market conditions across key trade lanes.
With NYFI as the foundation, the industry can evolve toward index-linked contracts — agreements that flex with the market.
When both sides operate against a transparent benchmark, neither gains by breaking their deal.
That alignment creates a sustainable, fair playing field — one where reliability is rewarded instead of punished.
And the next evolution is already underway: freight derivatives based on NYFI will soon give the industry new ways to hedge risk and manage volatility, offering the same financial stability that other commodities markets have enjoyed for decades.
Problem #2: Poor Planning and Execution
Even when commercial incentives are aligned, execution often fails in practice.
Bookings get rolled. Allocations go unused. Performance tracking happens weeks too late to matter.
The problem isn’t visibility — it’s timing. By the time data surfaces, the opportunity to correct course has already passed.
PPM — The Solution for Proactive Performance Management
PPM (Proactive Performance Management) from NYSHEX transforms the way shippers and carriers manage contract performance.
Instead of reviewing missed commitments after the fact, PPM tracks every booking, allocation, and exception in real time — giving both sides a shared view of what’s working and what’s not.
It answers critical questions early:
By turning performance data into actionable insights, PPM helps partners move from reactive firefighting to proactive coordination. Contract fulfillment becomes a living process, not a post-mortem.
The Future: Alignment + Execution = Reliability
Digital transformation in ocean shipping won’t come from apps and APIs alone.
It will come from aligned incentives and proactive execution — the combination that finally makes reliability measurable, manageable, and repeatable.
At NYSHEX, that’s exactly what we’re building:
Because reliability isn’t built by technology alone — it’s built by fulfillment you can measure, manage, and trust.