Transporting goods overseas generates a massive amount of information - and thus corresponding data. The ship that carries the cargo generates information about his estimated time of arrival, what cargo it carries, and so on. The cargo on board itself also generates information, such as container numbers, Bill of Lading information,... Furthermore, all private parties as well as authorities involved in the shipment all send and receive information back and forth. All these information streams are scattered over the 'supply chain field'. This makes it almost unfeasable for businesses to gather all of this information (let alone gather it in a structured way), and practically impossible to implement the data in their own systems. 

Luckily, NxtPort is working on a service to collect all relevant data about goods (on container level, but also on consignment level or B/L level for example) and offer this data in a user-friendly way via API's. There are API's on multiple levels: on the lowest level, there are API's such as the Import Consignment Data API and the CCRM API that focus on their specific subjects (CUSCAR and CCRM messages in these cases). On a higher level, there is the Track & Trace API, which will to a large extent be a summary API to gather data from the different low-level API's. So the Track & Trace API will bundle all individual statuses in the supply chain we have collected. Of course, the same data sharing rules apply to the Track & Trace API as in all low-level API's.