BILL OF LADING

C H A L L E N G E S

Solution (Leveraging Blockchain)

What is Bill of Lading (BOL)

Bill of lading (BOL) is one of the most important documents in the shipping pro-
cess. To ship any goods, a bill of lading is required and acts as a receipt and a
contract. A completed BOL legally shows that the carrier has received the freight
as described and is obligated to deliver that freight in good condition to the
consignee.

The information in the bill of lading is critical as it directs the actions of person-
nel all along the route of the shipment - where it's going, the piece count, how
it's billed, and how it's to be handled on the dock and trailers. It could be on a
prepaid or collect basis.

The consignee or exporter has to check whether the shipment is collect on deliv-
ery which means that the driver will collect the cost of the merchandise on deliv-
ery of the freight.

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More on Bill of Lading (BOL)

Bill of lading is issued for sea-freight shipments. Issued by Car-

rier to Shipping, as soon as they receipt the freight. With cur-

rent freight forwarders these contracts are either paper based

or in a soft copy, exchanges through emails or via couriers

Some facts about Bill of Lading

Millions of BOL Courier cost is

are created each Approximately
Year 90$ -100$

It takes 5 to 10 busi-
Approximately $5
ness days on average
Billions cost extra
for a Bill of Lading to
get from its origin to with errors and
the destination mistakes

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Common Mistakes with Bill of Lading (BOL)

Most freight forwarders or Shippers struggle when managing the carrier contracts.
There is clear lack of standardization in many aspects of the these contracts.

Identifying freight forwarding and shipping errors may seem easy, but avoiding
them is an entirely different challenge.

Here are the common mistakes by freight forwarders which can lead to inconsis-
tent and high cost of shipping.

Inconsitence file formats

Different port names refer to same port

Inconsistent freight charges & surcharges

Disordered output rates

Difficult currency conversation

In case of Bill of Lading shared via emails and couriers this could be time consum-
ing to identify the errors, in fact in some cases they are unseen and cause export-
ers & importers more. Here are some of the subsequences with cost increases.

Overall shipping time increases which results into high cost for Shipping Companies

Importers get delayed shipping or incorrect.

Return of good because of errors in contracts could be expensive for exporters.

Overall it affects all the parties in the chain.

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Common Mistakes with Bill of Lading (BOL)

With some processes, ownership of Bill of Lading transferred through couriers.

Process consumes lot of time and in some cases takes 5 – 6 days. Especially with
cross border shipments.

Exporter Importer

Total time needed for

The B/L is issued for For claim they need
B/L transfer via
sea-freight shipment B/L document
express courier services

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Blockchain in Nutshell

Blockchain is not just cryptocurrency, however, cryptocurrency does happen to be one of the more popu-
lar use cases of the Blockchain technology.

Blockchain works on a Distributed Ledger Technology, where no single entity is in control of the ledger.
Here, everyone belonging to the network has access to the same updated ledgers.

It is a decentralized network - implying, every participant has exactly the same ledgers available
(depending on the ledger permission defined by the network).

The ledgers are immutable. This doesn’t mean we cannot change anything on the ledger, but all the
changes will get appended to the chain of ledger or records, thereby making the each and every process
or transaction completely transparent for the parties involved. In short, it makes the ledger secure and
allows no manipulation.

One of the most powerful components of Blockchain is Smart Contracts. These have the potential to
replace all the paper-based agreements with digitized contracts. Such digitized contract cannot be forged
over the Blockchain network.

To understand about Blockchain in depth, visit:

https://blockgeeks.com/guides/what-is-blockchain-technology/

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MINDDEFT
S O LU T I O N

Leveraging Blockchain
We at Minddeft, focused on providing solutions for logistics problems by leverag-
ing cutting edge technologies like Blockchain.

We have built the solution to provide smart bill of lading that is user friendly yet
secure. It makes the legacy process of bill of lading much faster which ultimately
reduce the cost of overall shipping.

Our goal is to replace paper based contracts and related documents with decen-
tralized smart contracts which works automatically in decentralized networks.
That means no one control the data but everyone in the network has access to data
in real time.

Let’s check out some of the features in next slide.

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Features

Easy Onboarding
Simple and user friendly sign up process to
bring all stakeholders like exporters,
importers, freight forwarders and shippers
to part of the system. Including the invita-
tion system for inviting to be part of
system.

Smart Bill of Lading

Contract
Platform allows to create or import differ-
ent types of bill of lading contracts within
browser. What we are also building is to
allow user to import existing Bill of Lading
into the system leveraging OCR system.

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Features

Automated Workflow
Transfer the Ownership of Bill of Lading
can be automated yet secure way through
Blockchain cryptography. It supports com-
plex workflows between different users
and makes process much faster with some
clicks only.

Multi User Support

It allows different users to be part of the
system with different permissions.

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Features

Document Management
Systems
With this platform all the documents related to
bill of lading and shipping process can be
securely stored over blockchain. It will get rid of
errors and fraud with it’s immutable nature.

Secure API
Support for legacy systems through secure API

Other Features

Notification Systems for Future integration of Letter of

each event Credit (LoC) for shipping Trade
finance

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Benefits

Get Rid of Common Errors

and Improve Efficiency
With digitized and smart bill of lading
common mistakes with contracts can be
identified quickly and resolved run time.
That will improve the efficiency by 40%

Secure Contracts &

Documents
Unlike paper based contracts or documents
which are bound to be lost, error prone or
manipulated, with blockchain based con-
tracts and documents will be most secure.

Fast Process
With this solution process will be more than
50% faster than what we have currently. This
is possible because of real time automated
workflow, events and notifications within the
system. So that any subsequent action
doesn’t need to waited for a week. Even
incase of any issue with the shipping which
was not possible with previous manual pro-
cesses. Overall process reduce to 1 or 2 days
from 5 to 6 days earlier.

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Benefits

Decrease of cost by 3X
With faster process of logistics, less chances
of errors and real time working system
overall cost of shipping would be 3X lower
to what we have now.

No New System
In case of legacy systems or processes are
already working for the logistics compa-
nies, exporters and importers, our API solu-
tion will help to integrate with existing sys-
tems seamlessly. So, no requirement of pro-
curing new systems.

Faster Payments
For exporters, freight forwarders and ship-
ping (especially with ocean shipping) most
important part is the release of the payments,
which takes days to be done. With this solu-
tion payments will be much faster for export-
ers, freight forwarders and shipping compa-
nies.

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Screens

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Screens

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Minddeft Technologies PVT. LTD.

B2/1209, Palladium,
Behind Divya Bhaskar Press,
Corporate Road, Prahalad Nagar,
Ahmedabad - 380015

+91-79-40192627

krunal@minddeft.com / ramana.prasad@minddeft.com

https://www.minddeft.com