Perspective · 5 min read
Prevent demurrage before it becomes a logistics problem
Demurrage is the charge a charterer pays when a vessel stays in port longer than the laytime agreed in the charter party. For anyone moving crude, products or chemicals by sea, it is one of the few costs that can grow without anyone making a decision. A berth is busy, a pump runs slowly, a document arrives late, and the clock keeps running.
It is usually treated as bad luck, settled invoice by invoice. Looked at across a year of voyages, it rarely is.
The facts are already written down
Every voyage produces a statement of facts: when the notice of readiness was tendered, when the vessel berthed, when hoses were connected, when pumping started and stopped. Charter parties state the laytime and the rate. AIS data records where the vessel waited and for how long. Terminals know their own handling rates.
Each of these sits with a different team, in a different format. Put them side by side and patterns appear quickly: the berth that always pumps slowly, the port that is congested in one season, the terminal whose documents always take an extra day.
From counting to forecasting
The first step is simply to calculate laytime the same way, automatically, for every voyage. That alone shortens the claims process and ends arguments about whose spreadsheet is right.
The second step is to look forward. With the history of each port and berth, and the current queue, it is possible to estimate for each open voyage how likely it is to run over, and by roughly how much. An estimate with a range is enough to act on: speed up, slow down to arrive when the berth is free, or change the order of discharge.
What it does not do
No model removes congestion or bad weather. What it removes is surprise, and the habit of treating every claim as a one-off. The aim is a commercial team that sees exposure while there is still time to do something, and argues claims with the facts in front of them.
This is the kind of work our advanced analytics & predictive ai line does.