Industry-wide vessel container service schedule reliability improved, but carriers’ service standards for some commercial processes fall short says Drewry's latest report
Drewry Maritime Research’s new quarterly report 'Carrier Performance Insight' revealed that industry-wide vessel schedule reliability improved to 72.3% in the first quarter of 2012, but carriers’ service standards for some commercial processes remain as low 40%.
The latest result represents a 2.9 percentage point improvement on the previous record 69.4% on-time average recorded in the last quarter of 2011 and means that there have been reliability gains in four consecutive quarters. The most reliable carriers in the period were Maersk Line and its sister company Safmarine, followed by Hanjin Shipping.
For the first time, Drewry has incorporated new Key Performance Indicators, using data from e- commerce platform CargoSmart, that measure commercial and operational performance at the box- level. The low success rate of the KPI for ‘elapsed time between shipping instruction & bill of lading issue’, showing that roughly only 40% of shippers obtain BLs after three days of submitting the original shipping instruction, suggesting that there is still a lot of work required to improve certain commercial processes.
The KPI for ‘on-time shipment of cargo’ measures whether a box leaves the first port of load as scheduled. This first step is crucial and any delay at this point will inevitably lead to further hold-ups down the chain. CargoSmart’s data showed a consistent success rate of 66-70% in the same five months. That benchmark score indicates that delays are fairly common even before the box has been loaded on board.
“Any improvement in reliability should be welcomed, but an average score of around 70% is still far too low for a key service industry to be happy with,” said Simon Heaney, research manager at Drewry. “Carriers that want to secure new business – essential if they want to fill their big new ships – will have to aim higher than the current benchmark and not rest on their laurels. “Reliability remains an area that carriers can distinguish themselves from the competition. Shippers can play their part in driving future service quality by putting greater emphasis on reliability and other service criteria in their carrier selections,” added Heaney.
The report may be accessed here.