50% of planning time lost on re-scheduling

The majority of respondents said their scheduling processes and tools were not as timeefficient as they would like and, combined with external forces such as changing regulations and increasing demand from suppliers, fleet scheduling is becoming increasingly difficult.

The survey clearly showed that the fleet chartering and scheduling managers are scheduling fleets without any advanced decision-making aids, says Magenta. Half the companies surveyed either schedule fleets manually or use Excel spreadsheets. The majority of the remaining 50% surveyed use proprietary computerised systems that are similar to Excel and simple databases.

Every week fleet chartering and scheduling managers have to re-plan ships due to the requirements of individual cargo orders and the survey revealed that some shipping companies have over 20 different cargoes per week that require other vessels to be re-scheduled. With 67% of the shipping companies surveyed taking between one to seven days to reschedule their fleets for every order change, the inefficiencies in present scheduling systems becomes clear.

Respondents cited vessels arriving early or late as having the highest operational impact on chartering and scheduling.

This was followed by new cargoes and then port events and severe weather conditions.

Jonathan Himoff, ceo of Magenta Technology, said: “These results show that the burden of ensuring that shipping companies meet their contract obligations rests very heavily on the shoulders, and in the heads, of the fleet chartering and scheduling managers. Every manager in this role understands that you can make a good initial plan, but the impact of real-world events forces time-sensitive re-scheduling, often with difficult trade-offs. With shipping companies coming under increasing pressure from customer demands and all manner of industry regulations, fleet chartering and scheduling managers need the kind of decision-making tools that can help them make better decisions faster, which traditional planning and scheduling systems simply cannot provide.”