Commissioner Rebecca Dye briefed her fellow Commissioners this morning on the status of the FMC’s Supply Chain Innovation Team Initiative and its upcoming May 3rd launch at the agency’s Washington DC headquarters. That two-day inaugural session will involve approximately 36 industry leaders from across America’s international ocean transportation supply chain participating in three small innovation teams to identify actionable process improvements.

Those team participants will include leading officials from America’s three largest ports, four marine terminal operators, eight major shippers, and seven ocean carriers – plus ocean transportation intermediaries, port labor, railroads, truckers, and chassis providers.

Academic advisors to the FMC’s initiative include John’s Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Lab, the Transportation Institute at the University of Denver, the New York Shipping Exchange, Strategic Mobility 21, MIT’s Center for Transportation and Logistics, and others.

Commissioner Dye stressed that the Commission would be acting as a catalyst to encourage the innovation teams to take a broad view of the entire global supply chain, identify actionable recommendations to implement, and move beyond discussion to action.