From pre-fixture chartering decisions through to post-voyage financials and analysis, each stage of the commercial maritime workflow is reliant on the people who drive action for every voyage.

These many functional roles are essential building blocks that together enable the movement of ships and cargoes around the world. The maritime industry, and the world at large, is evolving into an age of enhanced digitalization, able to leverage new tools that can empower maritime professionals to work smarter. However, better understanding the roles and perspectives of the functions that make up the larger maritime workflow is essential to optimizing the overall process for greater efficiency, profitability, and scale.

The functional roles that fall within each step of the voyage lifecycle have a unique set of responsibilities, objectives, and measures of success. Let’s take a look at a sampling of roles, including a vessel charterer, a ship operator, and a financial professional, to determine what success looks like in each of these functions and how they contribute to the greater maritime workflow.

Chartering

As a busy vessel charterer, your role is among the most complex and essential in the maritime shipping world. From fixing the most profitable voyages to evaluating ongoing opportunities, adapting to market conditions, and accurately managing contracts, your daily work includes a diverse range of functions—all of which are vital to the success of your business.

Key Success Factors:

  • Understand the cascading effects of every chartering decision on operations and financials in order to make the best business decisions
  • Automate complex freight calculations to eliminate guesswork, dynamically evaluate estimates, and save valuable time
  • Integrate internal systems, linked indices, sanctions lists, and other market data sources for complete visibility and streamlined communications
  • Measure mark-to-market performance
  • Digitalize voyage contract process for optimized deal capture and tracking
  • Maximize revenue by optimizing scenario planning with comprehensive side-by-side comparisons between multiple vessel and cargo options

Operations

As a ship operator, complete visibility allows you to anticipate and act on ever-changing voyage details efficiently and effectively, while maximizing operational performance and minimizing costs. Whether you’re adapting to unforeseen circumstances in real time, measuring your mark-to-market performance, communicating with stakeholders throughout the deal chain, or highlighting trends and opportunities for improvement, the right digital solution can powerfully enhance your daily work.

Key Success Factors:

  • Optimize voyage management with real-time voyage data on speed, ETAs, bunker consumption, port expenses, etc.
  • Continuity across the entire voyage lifecycle to enable better decision making and insights for future voyages
  • Optimize data and ship to shore communications to better negotiate claims and improve bunker procurement decisions
  • Dynamic, real-time visibility into P&L
  • Enhance efficiency by eliminating manual workflows and error-prone data entry

Financials

As a maritime financial professional, you’re no stranger to the complexity of the maritime shipping P&L. This complexity can manifest itself in several challenges—including lengthy period close processes, substantial requirements for manual data entry, and costly information gaps. With the right digital solution, you can automate and accelerate period close, eliminate manual data entry, and ensure complete continuity between voyage and corporate accounting to improve your quality of life and your business’ bottom line.

Key Success Factors:

  • Simplify daily tasks by cutting out manual data entry
  • Integrate systems for continuity between the voyage and corporate accounting functions
  • Utilize comprehensive reports to uphold transparency and keep management informed
  • Contextualize and visualize data to maximize financial impact

Inherently subject to globally distributed operations and continuously evolving realities, the maritime industry relies on connectivity and visibility to make timely, profitable business decisions. Understanding the operating principles and the information needs of each functional role in the commercial maritime workflow is crucial for overall continuity – as chartering, operations, and financials are so closely interdependent. Utilizing digital technology in each of these roles can enable maritime professionals to work more efficiently by eliminating siloes and enhancing connectivity. Technology empowers owners, operators, traders, tonnage charterers, and other players in the market to navigate complex contracts and workflows with confidence. It reduces costs, improves visibility, and makes users more informed. It transforms shipping as we know it.

With an integrated, web-based freight and fleet management system at the center of your operations, every system user has access to business-critical solutions from wherever they are; ensuring your team can dynamically contribute to the success of the organization’s workflows.

As the world’s leading solution for commercial fleet and freight management, The Veson IMOS Platform (VIP) provides a suite of tools that is tightly integrated with chartering, operations, and financial workflows, enabling these functions to more effectively measure, manage, and optimize their business in today’s dynamic market.