Drewry: Boxship schedule integrity nears 70%

Drewry: Boxship schedule integrity nears 70%    A new report by Drewry Shipping Consultants suggests that liner carriers are improving their on-time performance in terms of schedule reliability.
   The quarterly Drewry Container Shipper Insight covering April through June said that 1,700 vessels tracked were on time or a day early 69 percent of the time. It's the best performance for carriers since Drewry began its schedule reliability survey at the end of 2005. The London-based consultant said average on-time results have been steadily increasing since the October-December 2008 monitoring period. In the January-March 2009 window, on-time arrivals were measured at 60 percent.
   Also improving is the average time deviation, or delay, from the scheduled day of arrival. The average deviation for all services and carriers in the April-June 2009 period was 0.8 days, marking the first time it has dipped under 1 day.
   U.S. Jones Act carrier Horizon Lines and Thailand-based intra-Asia specialist Regional Container Lines topped the latest ranking with perfect scores of 100 percent. The best performing lines among the top 20 carriers were Maersk Line and Hamburg S'd, tied for 12th place with 79 percent.
   'The latest results show that most of the big carriers are taking service reliability seriously, which is just as it should be as ship delays equal lost sales to shippers and a potential lost customer to carriers,' said Simon Heaney, editor of Container Shipper Insight. 'However, lines should not rest on their laurels. Being on time 69 percent of the time is O.K., but there is plenty of room for improvement and carriers are not in the habit of giving away more for less. The better reliability average is probably a combination of carrier actions and the near disappearance of port congestion delays as a side-effect of the global downturn in trade.'
   Heaney also noted that the demand downturn has induced service cutbacks from most carriers, 'which in turn has eased pressure on overstressed container terminals. With fewer active containerships operating right now the chances of one arriving at port on time but having to wait in a queue and then miss its berthing window are much slimmer.'
   The Container Shipper Insight report also provides the historical performances of carriers over the past 10 surveys to give readers an idea of each carrier's consistency level. Another Jones Act carrier, Matson, heads both long-term charts for on-time performance and average deviation. Maersk has the best record of all the major players in both charts.
   When calculating a carrier's individual reliability score Drewry looks at each service that it has space on, and not just the loops that it operates with its own vessels.
   'There have been a lot of new 'alliances' formed in recent months in the big east-west trades and carriers might be wise to look carefully at their new partners' track record before they jump into bed with them as they might find their score get dragged down if they choose badly,' Heaney said.
   He added that reliability has become a bigger marketing virtue than speed in the age of slow-steaming and it seems that most carriers are being more realistic with their scheduling.
   'In the past a few carriers were possibly guilty of trying to lure customers with the promise of fast transit times that they were unlikely to be able to deliver,' he said. 'We take our raw data from carriers' advertised schedules so another contributing factor to the better results might be that carriers are paying better attention to the detail in their schedules.”
   Drewry said that service quality should have a bigger influence on freight rate negotiations between carriers and shippers and has advised shippers to include on-time key performance indicators in their contracts with carriers.
   'Making reliability a key component of shipper/carrier contracts, maybe even with cashback clauses, could be a basis for getting rates off the floor and help build stronger and more efficient partnerships,' Heaney said. 'The danger is that reliability scores will fall back to their previous low levels when the recovery comes and the supply chain crumbles under the same pressures evident prior to the downturn.'
   Drewry's schedule reliability exercise is based on tracking of about 200 vessel arrivals every week and compares the scheduled day of arrival at the destination port (announced by the carrier at least two weeks before the date of departure) and the scheduled day of arrival for the same ship at the destination port. The comparison between scheduled arrival and actual arrival is based on calendar days. Drewry tracks whether the liner services meet or do not meet their scheduled days of arrival at three ports in North America, two in Europe, and one each in Asia and the Middle East.
   When several carriers are members of a joint service (for example, an alliance service), the reliability result for that service is attributed to every carrier.