BENCHMARKS
What the yes-to-JO gap actually costs.
The reference numbers on booking creation — re-keying time, digitisation rates, e-booking scale and the price of a rolled container — gathered in one place with sources named, plus an honest section on the benchmarks that don't exist yet.
SOURCES: DCSA · MAERSK/IBM · MCKINSEY · INTTRA/E2OPEN · UPDATED JULY 2026
The re-keying reality
Between a customer’s go-ahead and a booked container sits a job order that somebody has to build — and today it is mostly built by re-typing data that already exists in the accepted quote.
| Figure | What it measures | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 15–30 min | of pure data entry to create one booking manually — re-typing what the quote already knew | Industry workflow descriptions (vendor-published), consistent with DCSA's neutral characterization of booking data entry |
| 1.2% | of carrier bills of lading were digital in 2021 — the rest of the industry's shipment data moves by re-keying | DCSA (Thomas Bagge, CEO) |
| 200+ | interactions across ~30 organisations for a single container shipment | Maersk / IBM shipment study (2014, durable) |
| up to 60% | possible reduction in documentation lead time with generative AI, including auto-generated shipping documents | McKinsey |
| 1–4% | typical human data-entry error rates — a general benchmark, not forwarding-specific | General data-entry studies (flagged: not freight-specific) |
SOURCES NAMED PER ROW · VENDOR-DESCRIBED AND NON-FREIGHT FIGURES FLAGGED IN-LINE
Read the last row carefully: even at general-office error rates, a desk creating forty jobs a week by hand is shipping typos into B/Ls, customs filings and invoices — where each one becomes an amendment, a query or a dispute with a fee attached.
The e-booking layer
The forwarder-to-carrier leg of booking is already substantially digital. That is precisely what makes the remaining gap visible: the network can carry a booking in seconds, but somebody still has to build the job file that feeds it.
| Figure | What it measures | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 850k+ | container orders processed per week on the INTTRA network | INTTRA / e2open published figures |
| 25%+ | of global ocean trade booked through the network | INTTRA / e2open published figures |
| ~71% | of world ocean capacity connected to the network | INTTRA / e2open published figures |
SOURCE: INTTRA / E2OPEN PUBLISHED NETWORK FIGURES
What a rolled container costs
Cut-offs are the deadlines that decide whether a confirmed container actually sails. Miss one and the box rolls — and the meter starts.
| Figure | What it measures | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 7–10 days | typical delay to the next sailing when a container rolls | Industry sailing-frequency descriptions |
| $100–300/day | demurrage — the container occupying the terminal beyond its free days | Published carrier and port tariff ranges |
| $150–400/day | detention — holding the carrier's equipment outside the terminal too long | Published carrier tariff ranges |
| $1,400–7,000 | the cost of a 14-day roll at those per-day ranges, before commercial damage | Derived from the tariff ranges above |
| 37% | average rollover rate at major transhipment hubs — a 2020–21 crisis-era peak, not a steady state | Ocean Insights (via Cogoport) — flagged: crisis-era vintage |
SOURCES NAMED PER ROW · 2020–21 FIGURES FLAGGED AS CRISIS-ERA
Overbooking and vessel changes are the carrier’s share of rollover risk. Missed SI, VGM and gate-in cut-offs are yours — the only slice of a rolled container a forwarder actually controls is cut-off discipline.
The numbers that don’t exist
No public benchmark exists for time-per-job-file, booking amendment rate, or quote-to-book conversion — we searched, and the widely repeated “one in three B/Ls gets amended” claim has no traceable source, so we don’t use it. Our quarterly desk report will publish these numbers from live, anonymized forwarder desks: minutes per job file, amendment frequency, and quote-to-book conversion. Until then, the one figure we can publish is our own — 5m 42s from detected yes to pre-filled job order, end to end.
Run the numbers on your own desk.
The calculator turns your bookings per month and minutes per job into the annual cost these benchmarks imply.
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