Port calls are complex with many different stakeholders that need to align operational planning. Ships hurry to port and wait until operations can start. Without clarity on the timing of arrival, port stay and departure events, planning can only be ad-hoc and reactive. This makes port calling unreliable and unpredictable. Currently, there is no single source of “truth” for port call events. To ensure alignment across the end-to-end port call process, stakeholders must expend resources manually collecting accurate information on port call events. Without global standards, stakeholder APIs all “speak different dialects”, which means optimisation and interoperability must be implemented across many-to-many connections. This makes digitalisation efforts, and maintenance, expensive and unscalable. As a result, port call communication and execution are inefficient and unsustainable  

The DCSA Just-in-Time implementation framework and its API and message format facilitate instant communication of accurate, usable data for every event, making port call communication faster and unambiguous. This ensures safer, transparent, more reliable and sustainable port calls. With earlier clarity around planning for all port call events, operations for all interconnected port calls and supply chain nodes can be optimised. Standardised data also enables benchmarking and analysis for predictive, rather than ad-hoc, port call planning.  

The DCSA Just-in-Time (JIT) implementation framework is currently the only global technical standard for JIT port calls based on the semantics and definitions of the IMO-GIA JIT Arrival Guide. This ensures scalability. It includes open-source API definitions, an interface standard, message format and business process, making interoperability across all port call stakeholders a reality.  

The framework is super lightweight, with only 22 data attributes, making it easy to implement. It includes all important port call events, which means users can pick and choose from 112 event timestamp messages to exchange with their port call partners.