Industry Overview

Ship chandlers supply ship crew's food, ship's maintenance supplies, cleaning compounds, rope, et cetera. The reason for a ship's crew to use a chandler is that they do not have to find stores in the town they have landed in, nor hold that local currency - assuming they are let out of the dock compound by the immigration authorities. The ship owner has a line of credit with the chandler and is billed for anything delivered to the crew of his ship. The chandler is supplied by merchants local to his location. The main categories of supplies carried and listed by the ship chandler are dry stores, provisions, cabin supplies, deck supplies, engine supplies, bonded stores and petroleum product.

Business challenges

Ship chandler not only has to provide quality supplies to meet customer cost cutting needs but also has to fill and deliver the order without any delay as commercial ships discharge and turn around quickly, any delay is expensive.

Identified challenges:

• Increases quotation generation capabilities without hiring more employee.
• Maintains competitive pricing for customers.
• Maintain and control quotation margin.
• Generate multiple purchase orders from one customer order effectively.
• Find alternative item if suppliers do not have stock.
• Make reservation for stock item.
• Raise purchase order for back order stock item.
• Streamline business processes to improve productivity.

Customer needs

Globalization has extended and deepened the effects of containerization. The shipping lines have emerged as the most important players in these logistics chains, widening their maritime services and extending their control over landward movements. The costs of shipping business have been increasing because of the need to deploy ever larger and more costly vessels. Ship owners have to minimize the costs but in a well manage way to avoid false economies. At the same time they need to have plans in place to deal with inflation return, particularly when interest rates rise, as inevitably they will. Cost cutting is not only buying the cheaper goods from the ship chandlers but also maintaining low equipment breakdown rate which will cost the loss of time and business opportunity.

Solution

intelliShipStore Supply Management software is the solution to ship chandlers' business challenges. It streamlines business processes and collects business transaction data in real-time. Data and business information can be shared by authorized users. It increases operation productivity and visibility.