Ocean freight you can actually plan around
Furniture retail lives or dies on landed stock dates. A year of measured ETA accuracy let Baltic cut safety stock without risking empty shelves.
±2 days
Median ETA accuracy
18%
Reduction in safety stock
40
Trade lanes
The challenge
Baltic imports flat-pack furniture from Asia into Northern Europe. Ocean transit is inherently slow, which is fine — what hurt was that it was unpredictable.
Their previous ETAs moved so often that merchandising stopped trusting them and compensated with safety stock, tying up warehouse space and working capital.
What we did
We put their volume on weekly sailings across established lanes rather than chasing the cheapest available slot each time, trading a little cost for a lot of predictability.
Port-of-call and customs milestones surface on the same timeline as physical handovers, so a container held at a border is visible on day one rather than discovered on day six.
Where an ETA does move, it is flagged as running late rather than silently rewritten.
The result
Median ETA accuracy settled at plus or minus two days across a full year, including peak season.
With dates they could plan against, merchandising reduced safety stock by 18% without an increase in stockouts.
“Meridian is the first forwarder we have used where the ETA on the tracking page matched what actually happened, consistently, over a full year.”