There are a lot of letters and numbers associated with container tracking, and sometimes they can be confusing. Let’s look at how those letters and numbers can help you in your container tracking endeavors.
Your product is ready to be picked up from the shipyard, and thus far you’ve tracked the container through the bill of lading, the shipping number, or the container number. Now you need to go to the shipyard to verify that the contents of the container are in good order – but once you’re there, how do you find the container? Your cargo manifest has all the information on it, but with all those letters and numbers, you aren't sure exactly what you’re looking for. This shortcut will save you time and energy when identifying your shipping containers.
What's the shortcut? ISO 6346. Wikipedia defines ISO 6346 as
an international standard covering the coding, identification, and marking of shipping containers … [it] establishes a visual identification system for every container, [including] a unique serial number (with check digit), the owner, a country code, a size, a type and equipment category as well as any operational marks.
The code’s series of letters and numbers helps identify cargo. The beginning of the code, a series of capital letters, identifies the container’s owner. No two owners have identical codes due to the presence of a single international agency that issues the owner codes.
The second part of the code is the product code. This appears right after the owner code and consists of a single capital letter – either a U, J, or Z. "U" refers to the container itself, "J" refers to the equipment that can be attached to the container, such as power, and "Z" refers to a trailer or chassis that is used to ship the container.
Following is a series of six digits, which is the serial number. Each container has a unique value and each container owner can own up to one million containers.
The check digit is a single number used to verify that the identification sequence is correct; the digit is usually boxed and separate from the serial number. It is used because shipping terminals handle a large number of containers and there is always a risk that the identification sequence was incorrectly recorded. Standard procedure involves remotely recording the operator as they manually enter the sequence into the system or for the sequence to be recorded automatically through an optical character recognition computer system.
Then, four characters appear under the container identification code. The characters could be letters or numbers and provide the size/dimensions of as well as the type of container. The first character is related to the length of the container while the second character is the height of the container.
While deciphering these numbers might seem confusing and even annoying, having them is beneficial to you. Why? Because a study done by the World Shipping Council showed that approximately 350 containers go missing each year – and you don’t want one of those missing containers to be yours.
To learn more about topics like this or about other business topics, please contact Oates & Company.
