Ship agents in the 2020s

Mikael Lind from Research Institutes of Sweden and Juan Carlos Croston from Manzanillo International Terminal (Panama) rethink how a crucial part of the shipping ecosystem ought to transform in the digital era.

Traditionally, a ship agent (as a representative of the owner, the charterer -or both- of a visiting ship), ensures that the essential requirements for a ship visit are arranged and met. Therefore, they have an important monitoring role, before and during a port call, taking the necessary actions to avoid or minimize disruptions. Ship agents also guarantee that involved port actors are paid at the right level of compensation.

Enhanced digitization and collaboration in the maritime transportation sector, through implementation of digital data sharing, is an inevitable and unavoidable change and one that will affect the ship agent’s business.

The current article explores emerging opportunities, and prerequisites to harness these.

The traditional role of ship agents as the ship’s port call coordinator

The shipping industry is a self-organizing ecosystem where all its members are capital creation systems. They each develop their specific recipe for creating capital by converting capital from one form to another form of capital. For example, a shipping company uses economic capital to hire human capital to staff ships. The combination of individual members’ capital and their related systems for transforming capital from one form to another is the shipping ecosystem.

Ship agents provide two major types of capital. First, they provide social capital in the form of a network of connections with a port’s service providers because they typically have personnel physically located in a port’s city. Their specialized local social capital means they know whom to contact for routine and special services.

Second, they have developed routines and procedures, organizational capital, to deal with the local laws and regulations and atypical features of their port and its environment. They have created efficient procedures to weave together the various local requirements and services needed for a successful port visit in their territory.

Digital challenges for the ship agent

Traditionally, the port and its operators have relied primarily on the information provided by ship agents to understand the current and future status of a port call. However, increased implementation of digital data sharing among port actors is changing that.

Enhanced digital collaboration, by direct digital data sharing, creates a dynamic, up-to-date, common situational awareness as the basis for the alignment of activities in the port call process. An increased focus on port call optimization offers significant opportunities for efficiency improvements and environmental gains for service providers and consumers.

But this requires rethinking many port call activities and roles.

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