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January 14, 2025 Update

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January 14, 2025 Update

The Freightos Weekly Update helps you stay on top of the latest developments in international freight by giving you the rundown on the latest economic data, ocean and air demand trends, rate data – and anything else impacting the market.

Judah Levine

January 14, 2025

Weekly highlights

Ocean rates – Freightos Baltic Index:

Asia-US West Coast prices (FBX01 Weekly) stayed level at $5,924/FEU.

Asia-US East Coast prices (FBX03 Weekly) fell 1% to $6,898/FEU.

Asia-N. Europe prices (FBX11 Weekly) increased 1% to $5,640/FEU.

Asia-Mediterranean prices (FBX13 Weekly) increased 1% to $5,685/FEU.

Air rates – Freightos Air index

China – N. America weekly prices fell 4% to $5.90/kg.

China – N. Europe weekly prices increased 2% to $3.50/kg.

N. Europe – N. America weekly prices stayed level at $2.11/kg.

Analysis

Shippers who rely on US East Coast and Gulf ports were able to breathe a sigh of relief last Wednesday night when the ILA and USMX announced a tentative agreement for a new six year contract, ending the strike threat and extending the existing contract through the review and ratification period that is required by both parties and will begin shortly.

The sides had appeared far apart on the role of port automation, with the USMX seeking the introduction of technologies to make the ports more efficient, and the union rejecting even semi-automated operations that could eliminate jobs. But secret meetings by representatives last Sunday yielded language for a compromise that ultimately led to the Wednesday night announcement.

Details of the agreement are being withheld during ratification, but the joint statement explained that the agreement will protect current jobs and establish a framework for implementing technologies that will create more jobs and modernize the ports.

The WSJ reports that the new deal will bar full automation from ILA ports, and will detail processes for how new technologies will be implemented without reducing union headcounts. It reportedly will allow operations at ports which already have multiple semi-autonomous cranes operated by a single worker to remain unchanged, while terminals adding new semi-autonomous cranes will be required to hire one union worker for each new crane.

These terms look like a win for the ILA by preventing both the introduction of full automation and the loss of jobs when semi-automation is introduced. The USMX gains the right to introduce tech to improve efficiency – including better yard density – via the compromise, though without realizing the full cost reductions that automation otherwise might bring.

Frontloading ahead of the possible January strike had helped keep N. America container rates elevated into November but were no longer a driver of rates as the strike deadline got closer. Though transpacific prices to both coasts were level last week, rates had climbed sharply to start the month as demand is increasing ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday which starts January 29th. Asia – West Coast prices climbed 52% compared to late December up to the $6,000/FEU level with East Coast rates at about $7,000/FEU for a 30% gain.

For Asia – Europe and Mediterranean shippers LNY demand started earlier than usual this year due to longer lead times from Red Sea diversions. Rates that had increased about 60% from early November into December to about the $5,500/FEU level have been stable since then, with daily rates this week already starting to ease. Reports that some carriers intend to lower prices to about $4,000/FEU soon also suggest an unusually early end to the LNY rush and low expectations for the not uncommon upward pressure on rates just after the holiday.

Asia -Europe prices may soon fall all the way back to the Red Sea crisis-era floor of $3,000-$4,000/FEU hit in the low demand periods last year. But transpacific rates may not recede as significantly once LNY demand eases, since frontloading ahead of expected US tariff increases may be keeping volumes higher than they otherwise would be in Q1, with the NRF projecting a 10% increase in January volumes compared to last year.

So far there are no reports of significant logistics disruptions resulting from the devastating fires in Los Angeles, and container ports are far enough away from the blazes that they have been unaffected. The scope of the future rebuilding effort could eventually impact container volumes as construction material imports increase, which was one factor in elevated ocean volumes and rates into Turkey following the earthquake in 2023.

Air cargo rates continued to ease from their December peak season bump, but remain well above slow-season norms as e-commerce volumes continue to keep demand for capacity strong. Freightos Air Index data show transatlantic rates have fallen 33% from their December peak suggesting some peak season volumes were routed through Europe this year. But at $2.12/kg, the current rate is still 17% higher than a year ago and 32% higher than during low-demand periods last year, possibly reflecting the continued capacity deficit on this lane resulting in shifts of freighters to the Pacific.

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Judah Levine

Head of Research, Freightos Group

Judah is an experienced market research manager, using data-driven analytics to deliver market-based insights. Judah produces the Freightos Group’s FBX Weekly Freight Update and other research on what’s happening in the industry from shipper behaviors to the latest in logistics technology and digitization.

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Shipsy Connects Transportation Orchestration With Exception Response

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Transportation management is expanding beyond planning loads and tendering freight. Modern platforms are increasingly expected to coordinate carriers, track execution, optimize routes, manage exceptions, communicate with stakeholders, and use live operating data to adjust decisions while freight is moving.

Shipsy is positioned around that broader logistics-orchestration model. Its cloud platform spans transportation management, carrier allocation, freight procurement, shipment tracking, route optimization, first-mile through last-mile workflows, and analytics. The company also emphasizes AI-enabled capabilities intended to automate planning and execution decisions across increasingly complex logistics networks.

The connection to exception management is significant. Transportation generates a constant stream of deviations: capacity changes, missed pickups, route delays, delivery risks, documentation problems, and customer-service exceptions. A platform that already coordinates transportation workflows has the opportunity to detect those events, assess their impact, and automate an appropriate response inside the same operating environment.

The buyer question is how well those capabilities scale across real-world complexity. Organizations should evaluate optimization quality, carrier and system connectivity, geographic depth, data latency, workflow configurability, and governance for automated actions. The most useful AI in transportation will be the AI that reliably improves execution, not simply the AI that adds another interface.

Shipsy is included in the Logistics Viewpoints Transportation Management Systems MarketMap and Autonomous Exception Management MarketMap. The combination reflects the increasingly close relationship between transportation management and the systems responsible for identifying and resolving operational exceptions.

The post Shipsy Connects Transportation Orchestration With Exception Response appeared first on Logistics Viewpoints.

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Beyond the Silos: Five Technology Markets Are Converging Into a New Supply Chain Architecture

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Join me on Thursday, October 29 at 11:00 AM ET for ARC Advisory Group’s webinar, Beyond the Silos: Five MarketMaps Shaping the Next Supply Chain Technology Architecture. We will use ARC’s MarketMaps for Warehouse Management Systems, Transportation Management Systems, Supply Chain Planning, Decision Intelligence, and Autonomous Exception Management to examine where these markets are converging, where they remain distinct, and what that means for the architecture you are building.

REGISTER FOR THE WEBINAR

If you are evaluating, replacing, or integrating supply chain technology, this is the conversation to have before your next major technology decision.

Supply chain technology has traditionally been organized into distinct application categories. Warehouse Management Systems managed activity inside the four walls. Transportation Management Systems planned and executed freight movements. Supply Chain Planning systems developed forecasts and plans. Other applications handled visibility, analytics, or specific operational problems.

Those distinctions made sense when the applications themselves operated largely as separate systems.

They make considerably less sense today.

The boundaries between supply chain technology markets are beginning to blur as vendors expand beyond their traditional domains and companies demand faster connections between planning, decision-making, exception management, and execution. The result is not necessarily the emergence of one enormous supply chain platform. Instead, we are seeing the development of a more interconnected technology architecture in which responsibilities increasingly overlap.

That creates both opportunity and complexity for supply chain technology buyers.

WMS and TMS Are Expanding Beyond Their Traditional Boundaries

Warehouse Management Systems remain responsible for the core disciplines of inventory movement, receiving, putaway, picking, packing, and shipping. But modern WMS platforms increasingly extend into labor management, robotics orchestration, yard operations, order fulfillment, transportation coordination, and broader execution workflows.

Transportation Management Systems are undergoing a similar evolution. TMS applications once focused primarily on load planning, carrier selection, tendering, and freight settlement. Today, many platforms incorporate real-time transportation visibility, appointment scheduling, dock coordination, capacity intelligence, analytics, and increasingly sophisticated decision support.

This means the boundary between warehouse and transportation execution is becoming increasingly important.

A trailer arriving at a distribution center is simultaneously a transportation event, a yard event, a dock event, and potentially a warehouse labor-planning event. The technology architecture has to reflect that operational reality.

The question is no longer simply whether a company needs WMS and TMS. The more interesting question is how those systems exchange information and coordinate decisions.

Supply Chain Planning Is Moving Closer to Execution

The same convergence is happening between planning and execution.

Historically, Supply Chain Planning systems developed plans that execution applications were expected to carry out. But a plan that cannot account for actual inventory, transportation capacity, warehouse constraints, labor availability, or changing demand conditions quickly loses value.

Planning therefore becomes much more powerful when it can incorporate execution realities.

The architectural challenge is closing the distance between identifying what should happen and understanding what can actually happen.

This is pushing planning systems toward more continuous planning processes while execution platforms increasingly incorporate predictive and prescriptive capabilities of their own.

The boundary between planning and execution is therefore becoming less of a handoff and more of a feedback loop.

Decision Intelligence Introduces Another Layer

Decision Intelligence adds another dimension to this architecture.

Supply chains generate thousands of decisions every day: whether to expedite an order, change a carrier, shift inventory, modify production, prioritize a customer, alter a fulfillment path, or respond to a disruption.

Traditionally, those decisions have been distributed across applications, business rules, spreadsheets, control towers, and human judgment.

Decision Intelligence technologies attempt to create a more systematic approach by combining data, analytics, business context, optimization, and increasingly artificial intelligence to help organizations evaluate available choices.

That raises an important architectural question.

Which system should actually own the decision?

A planning application may identify an inventory imbalance. A transportation system may recognize a capacity problem. A warehouse system may understand the operational constraints. A Decision Intelligence platform may evaluate several alternatives.

Determining where the decision should reside becomes as important as determining which systems provide the underlying information.

Autonomous Exception Management Addresses the Moment the Plan Breaks

Perhaps the most interesting emerging category is Autonomous Exception Management.

Supply chains rarely operate exactly according to plan. Shipments arrive late. Demand changes. Production lines stop. Inventory becomes unavailable. Weather disrupts transportation. Suppliers miss commitments.

Traditional systems frequently identify these problems but still rely heavily on people to determine what to do next.

Autonomous Exception Management attempts to shorten that cycle by identifying disruptions, understanding their business implications, evaluating potential responses, and in some cases initiating corrective action.

This represents an important shift.

Supply chain technology has spent decades becoming better at creating plans and executing transactions. The next frontier may be becoming better at managing the space between those two activities, when reality diverges from the plan.

That is also where Decision Intelligence, planning, transportation, warehouse execution, and exception management increasingly intersect.

The Architecture Matters More Than the Application Category

For technology buyers, these overlapping capabilities create a new challenge.

Simply comparing WMS vendors against other WMS vendors, or TMS vendors against other TMS vendors, does not necessarily reveal how a technology stack will operate as a whole.

Organizations increasingly need to ask architectural questions.

Where should planning occur? Which system should identify an exception? Which application has enough context to evaluate possible responses? Which system should initiate execution? What data needs to move between platforms? And where should humans remain directly involved in the decision?

There will not be one universal answer.

Different companies will make different architectural choices depending on their operational complexity, existing technology investments, organizational structure, and strategic priorities.

But one principle is becoming increasingly clear: adding another powerful application without understanding how it fits into the broader architecture can simply create another technology silo.

Five MarketMaps, One Emerging Architecture

On October 29, ARC Advisory Group will examine this convergence through five ARC MarketMaps: Warehouse Management Systems, Transportation Management Systems, Supply Chain Planning, Decision Intelligence, and Autonomous Exception Management.

These markets are not becoming identical. Each continues to address a distinct set of supply chain problems.

But the relationships between them are becoming increasingly important.

The next generation of supply chain architecture will likely be defined less by rigid application categories and more by how effectively companies connect four fundamental functions: planning what should happen, deciding what to do, managing what changes, and executing the response.

Understanding those relationships is becoming essential for organizations modernizing their supply chain technology environments.

Before You Make Your Next Supply Chain Technology Decision

If your company is buying, replacing, or integrating WMS, TMS, Supply Chain Planning, Decision Intelligence, or exception-management technology, the important question is no longer simply which product fits a category.

You also need to understand where that technology belongs in the larger architecture, what decisions it should own, what other systems it must work with, and where overlapping functionality creates either value or unnecessary complexity.

That is exactly what we will address in this webinar.

Join me Thursday, October 29 at 11:00 AM ET for Beyond the Silos: Five MarketMaps Shaping the Next Supply Chain Technology Architecture.

We will put all five markets on the table together and examine how planning, decisions, exceptions, transportation, and warehouse execution are beginning to form a broader supply chain technology architecture.

If you expect to make a significant supply chain technology decision over the next 12–24 months, register now. Make sure your next investment strengthens the architecture instead of becoming the next silo.

REGISTER NOW — OCTOBER 29, 11:00 AM ET

The post Beyond the Silos: Five Technology Markets Are Converging Into a New Supply Chain Architecture appeared first on Logistics Viewpoints.

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Decision Intelligence in 2026: From Analytical Insight to Consequential Decisions

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Decision Intelligence is best understood not as another AI label, but as the discipline of improving consequential decisions. Enterprises already have analytics, dashboards, planning systems, visibility platforms, and increasingly capable models; the real question is whether those capabilities materially improve a decision and shorten the path from changing conditions to coordinated action.

Analytics can explain what happened and predict what may happen. Decision Intelligence goes further by connecting the signal to context, tradeoffs, priorities, and an operating choice. The difference is material: a forecast has value only when the organization can decide what to change because of it. The earlier discussion of a logistics control layer helps locate Decision Intelligence architecturally: between observed operating state and the governed actions that established execution systems must carry out.

ERP, planning, TMS, WMS, visibility, risk, and network platforms remain systems of record and execution; decision intelligence sits above and across them where context is assembled, tradeoffs are evaluated, actions are prioritized, and responses are coordinated. This is why traditional application boundaries are beginning to blur. Planning, visibility, risk, logistics, and enterprise platforms can all participate if they demonstrate real decision depth rather than simply expose more information.

The relevant examples include rebalancing inventory after a disruption, protecting a priority customer during constrained capacity, choosing among freight alternatives, responding to supplier risk, or deciding whether an exception should be automated, escalated, or left alone. Buyers should ask what decision is improved, what context is assembled, what tradeoffs are evaluated, what authority is required, and how the chosen action reaches execution. If those answers remain vague, the product may be analytics or workflow rather than Decision Intelligence.

A platform can be deep in one decision domain or broad across many functions. Neither is universally better. The right fit depends on the decisions the enterprise is trying to improve, the time horizon, the data and systems involved, and whether coordination across organizational boundaries is central to the problem.

Evaluate decision fit, decision depth, operating reach, context quality, scenario and tradeoff capability, workflow and execution connectivity, governance, explainability, evidence quality, and referenceable outcomes and measure decision quality, decision latency, recommendation acceptance, outcome improvement, operating reach, scenario usefulness, cross-functional coordination, execution connectivity, auditability, and measurable business impact. The strongest proof is not an AI feature list; it is a referenceable operating outcome showing better decision quality, faster response, or improved coordination.

The shift from insight to consequential decisions is what makes Decision Intelligence strategically interesting. It focuses the market on the business outcome that matters: not how much intelligence a platform can produce, but whether the organization makes a better decision because of it.

Decision Intelligence has to reach a consequential operating choice

The strongest way to keep the category disciplined is to begin with a decision class rather than a technology label. A platform may use optimization, machine learning, simulation, generative AI, knowledge graphs, workflow, or event intelligence. Those technologies are relevant only insofar as they improve the quality, speed, coordination, or traceability of an actual supply chain decision.

That standard also separates DI from horizontal analytics and generic enterprise AI. Buyers should ask what changed because the platform was present: which option was selected differently, which tradeoff became visible, which response happened sooner, which approval path became clearer, and whether the decision reached execution. The output is not the end product; the improved decision is.

Related Logistics Viewpoints research

2026 Supply Chain Decision Intelligence Market Map
The New Architecture of Logistics
Systems Engineering in Logistics
What Is Supply Chain Decision Intelligence, and Why It Matters Now

Request the 2026 Supply Chain Decision Intelligence Market Map Brochure

The 2026 Market Map is designed to help organizations understand the structure of the Decision Intelligence market, evaluate provider differences, and identify the capabilities most relevant to their operating environment. If your organization is evaluating Decision Intelligence platforms or clarifying where decision intelligence fits within the broader technology architecture, I would be glad to provide the Market Map brochure and discuss the evaluation questions and provider differences most relevant to your requirements.

Request the Decision Intelligence Market Map Brochure

For technology providers

Providers may request the brochure, discuss the research framework, or contact me to confirm how their capabilities are represented in the market assessment.

Discuss the research or confirm your profile

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