The new FMC regulations aim to bring transparency to the forefront, but leveraging the right technology is crucial for breaking that glass ceiling and ensuring success.

Impact of New Rulings: Starting May 28, 2024, the updated FMC rules clarify detention and demurrage billing practices to ensure fairness and improve dispute resolution.
Technology as a Facilitator: Terminal49 is instrumental in achieving the quality of data transparency and efficiency required by new FMC rules, providing essential real-time tracking and visibility.
Operational Implications: New regulations mandate transparent billing from ocean carriers, simplifying fee management and dispute resolution for stakeholders such as exporters and truckers.
Role of Standardized Data: High-quality, standardized data is essential for adhering to new rules, improving communication, and ensuring transparency in the shipping process.

What is the Ocean Shipping Reform Act and What Does it Do for the FMC?

The Ocean Shipping Reform Act of 2022 significantly expanded the FMC's regulatory oversight and authority, targeting unfair practices by ocean carriers, including excessive fees and unwarranted denial of cargo space for US exports. The government and Washington designed the act to reduce costs, streamline operations, and bolster US exports. However, ambiguities in billing practices and a general lack of clear dispute management processes posed challenges in the act's implementation.

In response, the Federal Maritime Commission published its latest ruling in February 2024, further defining detention and demurrage billing practices, which are set to take effect on May 28, 2024. This ruling aims to further mitigate unfair practices and enhance transparency across the shipping sector, ensuring that charges are levied fairly and disputes are resolved more efficiently..

What is The Purpose of The New Rule?

The new ruling aims to eliminate unfair practices further and facilitate transparency across the shipping process for exporters and ocean carriers. This way, the FMC can guarantee:

Lower Costs because shippers and exporters will now be charged only for delays for which they are responsible.
Predictability and efficiency, thanks to clearer invoices and a more streamlined process. This allows export businesses to plan shipping operations effectively from an operational and financial perspective.
Faster dispute resolution due to more transparent practices and overall integrity will minimize unnecessary disputes. This would inevitably lead to a seamless operation for all parties involved.

Implications For Stakeholders in International Shipping

The new rule introduces significant operational changes for stakeholders within international shipping, notably ocean carriers and exporters. It mandates ocean carriers to provide transparent invoicing, clearly delineate rates, and comprehensively explain the methodologies used for calculating charges.

Moreover, the regulation ensures that undue demurrage and detention fees are not unjustly passed on to trucking carriers. With the new rule, each party is responsible for its actions. If the delays, detention, and demurrage are the fault of the exporter, then the ocean carrier must be able to detail this, which makes transferring the payment to the exporter a no-brainer. This way, disputes can be resolved quickly.

The essence of the rule is to promote fairness and streamline operations, compelling all involved parties to refine their processes for greater operational efficiency. Such enhancements are expected to lead to significant reductions in operational costs.

Achieving these goals hinges on the availability of precise, real-time, quality data. Stakeholders must know what happens at every milestone through real-time shipment monitoring. This includes arrivals, location, last free day, discharge, gate out, and empty returns.

Impact on Stakeholders

According to the new FMC rules, only cargo owners get billed by shipping lines. This is important because it frees up carriers to focus more on the transportation process. It also prevents the perception of ocean carriers injecting additional fees into the invoices.

Traditionally, shippers and exporters have been subject to unclear invoices. Coupled with a lack of standardized billing practices and transparencies. It was not uncommon to find a shipper trapped with inaccurate charges. Delays are also a concern caused due to factors outside a shipper's control, such as slow terminal operations or inefficient carrier practices.

Stakeholders, especially the exporters and truckers, had to contend with inaccurate billing due to unjust detention and demurrage fees. Meaning a lack of access to data on container status and free days caused a significant portion of detention and demurrage.

The new rule clears things up for all stakeholders and prevents unnecessary disputes impacting operational efficiency. It also reduces the administrative overhead for carriers, allowing them to focus their attention on ensuring the transportation process is completed without a hitch.

Impact of the New FMC Rules Across Various Roles in Exports and International Shipping

The news about the FMC regulations significantly affects a broad array of stakeholders within the International Maritime Export (IMEX) value chain, including ocean carriers, exporters, freight forwarders, and truckers. These rules are designed to mitigate undue costs and streamline operations. Examples:

Operators

Traditionally tasked with billing exporters and truckers, operators have faced challenges related to the accuracy of data influencing billing. The new process helps simplify billing, potentially leading to fewer disputes.

Logistics Coordinators

Previously, logistics coordinators struggled with a lack of transparency and delays in billing information, complicating the management of fees and disrupting logistics processes. With new rules and effective tracking solutions, clearer billing practices will be followed by increased transparency and visibility throughout the shipping process. This, in turn, makes it easier for logistics coordinators to track and manage fees.

Industry Stakeholders/Container Owners

These stakeholders could not plan for key logistics milestones and budget their process effectively due to poor data quality. Ultimately, this left them burdened with unexpected fees and poorly planned operations, costing them a lot of money. With improved transparency across the board, including billing practices, they can coordinate more with other stakeholders and enjoy a high level of trust. Rather than being subject to the opinions of another party or stakeholder.

By adopting Terminal49’s products that emphasize real-time data accuracy and seamless integration, all stakeholders can better navigate the new FMC rules, ensuring compliance and optimizing their operational strategies for better outcomes.

Billing and Dispute Process

The new FMC rules mandate the ocean carriers to ensure that their billing practices are as clear and transparent as possible. Ultimately, this means more detailed invoices explaining the reason for the charges and how they are calculated. The bill or invoice must be addressed to the responsible parties for demurrage and detention.

For disputes, stakeholders can have an informal and formal dispute resolution. If the informal dispute, which is just between the ocean carrier and the shipper or other stakeholder, fails, the affected party may file a formal complaint with the FMC. However, the burden of proof will always be on the carrier to justify the charges.

All parties are mandated to document all records relating to the D&D charges and invoices for five years. This is to make potential disputes so much easier to handle.

Impact on Daily Operations

The new FMC ruling and policy are expected to impact shipping operations and stakeholders positively in the following ways:

Operators will enjoy faster and more accurate billing cycles, putting less pressure on operational costs.
Logistics coordinators will efficiently manage and track financial liabilities and disputes.
Other stakeholders will be pushed to be more compliant and predictable in handling fees. That will aid in budgetary planning and effective operational forecasting.

Role of Visibility Solutions

The new FMC rule aims to enhance transparency throughout the shipping process. However, it is advancements in technology that will truly guarantee compliance for all parties. These technological innovations provide real-time data monitoring and alerting systems that automatically notify stakeholders whenever a milestone is reached, which is critical for managing logistics operations effectively.

A core aspect of visibility solutions is the quality and standardization of data. In this regard, high-quality, standardized data is essential for achieving transparency, invoice clarity, and accountability. By adhering to standardized data metrics, operators, logistics coordinators, and container owners can comply with industry standards more easily. This will ensure improved transparency and facilitate seamless communication between all stakeholders.

In practice, this standardized approach enhances capabilities in tracking and monitoring container status and allows operators to provide timely responses to billing issues.

Strategic Benefits

Operators: It enhances their capabilities in tracking and monitoring container status and providing timely responses to billing issues.
Logistics Coordinators: It allows for more streamlined data access. This, in turn, will enable more effective dispute resolution and operational adjustments.
Stakeholders: They can enjoy better oversight and data-driven decision-making capabilities throughout shipping. This will lead to more resilient operational strategies. Overall, it will help them perform better.

Conclusion

The introduction of the new FMC rules will represent a significant step towards rectifying long-standing inefficiencies and unfair practices in the shipping industry. It will enhance the financial security of all stakeholders. However, the success of these regulations heavily relies on adopting advanced technological solutions like the Terminal49. By integrating such technologies, stakeholders can ensure compliance with the new rules, enhance operational transparency, and drive efficient and fair shipping practices.

Join us on Wednesday, May 22 at 2:00 PM CST as we discuss strategies for implementing the OSRA 2022 final ruling effective May 28, 2024. This final ruling addresses steamship line invoicing requirements and the timing associated with the receipt, dispute, and resolution of D&D invoice disputes.