reprinted from Canadian Sailings - Sept. 4, 2000

Be Your Own Dot.Com

Be your own "Dot-Com”, says Tony Young, founder and chief executive of Novonet Data Systems, the IT company owned by LCL Navigation. He recently announced the launching of Novonet’s IT services for the transportation industry. Tony Young believes that liner agents and freight forwarders should embrace e-commerce by turning their businesses into e-businesses rather than rely on the services of transport Dot-Com companies. He said: “When you entrust 3rd party e-commerce or 3PL (third-party logistics) operators to manage your data, you are entrusting your entire business to them. Your clients should not be doing e-business with you at someone else’s website. They should be doing it at your own”. In his view, the Internet and web technology are just the latest “tools of the trade” and he believes it will make the fax machine obsolete just as faxing made telex obsolete.

Novonet was founded over ten years to computerize LCL Navigation's NVOCC business. In the process, it became clear that the task was not a simple matter of programming computers to replicate what humans were doing but the work process itself had to be re-engineered. As a result LCL Navigation achieved the highest productivity in the industry in terms of number of shipments processed per employee and in terms of speed and accuracy of their documentation and level of customer service provided. “The two biggest items in any company’s overhead are salary and rent. If you can grow your business without increasing these, you’re ahead of the game”, said Tony Young. LCL Navigation's cargo volume more than doubled over the last ten years while the number of staff remained relatively the same.

Now Tony Young sees the industry facing a new challenge: e-ability. He predicts trading partners may not want to do business with those who cannot do e-business. “A consignee 12 time zones away may not want to wait till the next business day for an e-mail reply if the information he seeks should be readily available at the carrier's or forwarder’s website. A busy shipper may not want to wait on the phone to make a booking when it could be done over the Internet.”  He thinks paper documents will soon become obsolete as electronic versions become the norm.

Novonet is currently working with international bankers on setting-up an on-line B2B freight and L/C settlement system among carriers, forwarders, brokers and merchants, not as a dot-com venture, but as a B2B model for the entire import/export and transportation industries. When implemented, the system will be nothing less than revolutionary.

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