They Clicked , they sailed, they berthed

Published by Malaysian Business

SHIPPING companies in Malaysia would soon be pleased to discover that it is really a breeze doing business with Malaysian port authorities. Come next year, Dagang Net, Malaysia's e-commerce powerhouse that provides a one-stop centre for electronic trade facilitation, would have achieved yet another major milestone in transforming the submission of manifests to all local port authorities.

The service, known as e-Manifest, will be rolled out to four major ports in the first phase, before eventually introducing it to the rest of the ports in the country. With Dagang Net's wealth of experience at Port Klang, e-Manifest is another first among a wide range of web-based value-added services offered by Dagang Net's portal known as MyPorts.

e-Manifest makes the task of manifest submission a seamless job. It will provide a single gateway allowing streamlined and speedy submission of manifest forms leveraging upon Internet technology. Once the system is deployed, manifest submission is just a matter of a few mouse clicks away.

`We are going to handle electronic manifests in a big way. We have been operating this system for the Port Klang community for more than lo years and have in-depth experience in this area. Dagang Net will be the gateway for electronic manifests in Malaysia,' says Saifol Shamlan, chief executive officer of Dagang Net Group of Companies.

In September 2004, the Malaysian Chapter of International Ship Owners Association (ISOA) made a call for such a service to be introduced to the other ports and the Government has plans to streamline and standardise the document processing across all local ports to increase trade volume capacity and efficiency.

`The ISOA and the Government saw the value in having a streamlined electronic document system that makes the processing of manifest submissions faster and more efficient,' says Saifol. As local port authorities have different methods and formats to handle submission of manifests.
Shipping companies and port operators need to employ data entry clerks to manually re-key in the manifest data that they receive from the shipping lines.

The job is further complicated by the fact that each local port operator has different formats for manifest submission. Hence, it is often a costly, mundane and frustrating experience for shipping companies when submitting manifests electronically.

`With the e-Manifest system, the need to employ data entry clerks is greatly reduced.' says Zaharin Ali, senior general manager of Dagang Net. It would also be a totally new experience towards increasing efficiency and speed. `e-Manifest is going to be the leading single gateway that streamlines operations based on one effective and standardised format to submit manifests,' Saifol adds.

The beauty of e-Manifest is the way the company has crafted a `national superset format' for manifest submission. The system enables shipping companies to use the superset format, which Dagang Net then automatically re-formats the data to suit the unique electronic manifest format as required by each port operator. Essentially, the e-Manifest system is an automated system of information extraction, from the superset file, and form submission to the relevant port operator. All this is done with minimal human intervention. `Operationally, business complexity is greatly reduced for the shipping companies,' says Saifol. In addition, says Saifol, using the e-Manifest, would also increase the rate of accuracy and reduce operational costs.

A parallel benefit that e-Manifest brings is that the Royal Malaysian Custom will also receive a standard form of manifest data for all participating ports from a single national gateway, which is Dagang Net.

E-commerce is here to stay. With Internet-based technology, e-Manifest is the future of doing business in our ports. At the end of the day, ensuring that goods reach their final destination in lightn:rg speed is the key measure of success