The value of benchmarking performance

In today’s highly competitive economy, a longstanding organizational directive for virtually all corporate functions has only intensified: reducing the operating costs of an asset while improving the business value the asset generates. Yet many executives in shipping struggle to answer that call because they lack a detailed picture of their function’s performance along key dimensions or, more importantly, how that performance measures up to their peers.Benchmarking is a critical tool in that regard. It helps you to define the right strategy by you to gauge where your organization leads, lags, or operates at par with its peers (i.e other vessels). Equally important, benchmarking provides the baseline by which you can articulate key issues and set targets to achieve specific outcomes. In doing so, benchmarking helps to identify and address the areas that most urgently need improvement.In its work with clients, We4Sea has seen how benchmarking can help you as a performance manager or executive to attain these goals, effectively and efficiently understanding the current state of your vessels- and comparing them with sister vessels.Benchmarking of noon reports of chartered vessels, however, can be a challenging -or even impossible- task. The noon-reported consumption is an average over a 24 hour period, where the consumption is impacted by speed, draft, and weather. Without context data, it is impossible to judge if the reported consumption is in line with expectations.As over 95% of the chartered vessels rely on noon-reporting, benchmarking the reported data is of extreme importance.We4Sea offers a new approach: a monitoring solution to benchmark noon-reported fuel consumption of any (chartered) vessel – in real-time.An example is given below. It can be seen that the noon-reported fuel consumption (green dotted line) is varying over time. But is the vessel performing good or bad? This simple question can not be answered by this data.

Our Digital Twin can answer this question. In the below plot, the blue line represents the expected consumption, as calculated with our Digital Twin. The Digital Twin model has calculated the expected consumption for this vessel, taking into account vessel specifications, speed, draft, and weather conditions. As can be seen, the consumption reported is higher than can be expected.

When we plot the speed against reported main engine fuel consumption, we see a clear trend. It also can be noticed there is quite some scatter, caused by differences in speed, draft, and weather. Also, the number of data points is limited, only one per day.

In checking compliance with the original vessel speed/consumption plots, most companies simply discard days with bad weather, sometimes taking out up to 70% of the data points. Some of our clients have stated, that they end up with just 4 or 5 data points for a 20 days voyage.We4Sea's Digital Twin calculates, on average every 5 to 10 minutes, the expected consumption. As the Digital Twin already takes into account weather, draft, and speed, the data can directly be used to benchmark noon-reported consumption. There is no need to discard any noon-reported data anymore, which makes the results more reliable.

When trendlines are added, it can be seen that this vessel is clearly underperforming. At 15kn, she should be consuming 70MT per day, where she reports about 78MT per day, at an additional cost of over 2500USD per day. The most probable cause is the fouling of the hull or propellor.

Are you interested in benchmarking your noon data in real-time? Contact us for a free consultation!

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