The shipping industry has moved a step nearer to a "common language" in efforts to arrive at a broad-based way of measuring the performance of ships, says InterManager's Guy Morel.
Last week, the shipmanagement trade association presented at the Baltic Exchange in London its proposed set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to a spread of industry organisations.
Stakeholders will not be asked to abandon classical methods of measuring performance, says the InterManager general secretary. But the drive to offer a standardised tool has a huge upside, including applying it to contracts.
The International Chamber of Shipping (ICS), Intertanko, Intercargo, Bimco, the International Union of Marine Insurers, the International Shipping Federation and even the European Commission (EC)'s Directorate General for Transport & Energy (DG Tren) and the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) were among those present.
A "great day" is how Morel described the outcome, with an invitation to industry players now to join the various workshops focussing on publishing KPIs they will be able to vet.
Both the regulatory bodies present, the IMO and DG Tren, said they wanted to get involved. Morel adds that the IMO representative even proposed that what could turn out to be a massive database could be housed by the London-based organisation.
The target is to publish within one year a list of agreed, analysed and tested shipping KPIs.
Phase one of the InterManager initiative has seen detailed definitions of KPIs drawn up and their stability measured. Now, shipowners, insurers, classification societies, charterers and others have the opportunity to scrutinise them.
Some could be changed, some added, others cancelled, says Morel, to "arrive at a set of KPIs representing the collective wisdom and agreement of the whole industry".
Morel adds that feedback from the Baltic Exchange meeting was that, although industry players have their own KPIs, each differ and what is needed is a "common language in order to communicate" and talk about ship performance in a standardised manner.
He cites as a hypothetical example measuring performance for insurance-quotation purposes.
The system is particularly relevant also to third-party shipmanagers where, says Morel, KPIs can incentivise companies paid according to performance, rather than the widely used flat-fee system.
Only around 15% of InterManager's company clients are said to have so far accepted the use of KPIs but Morel says that once there is an industry standard and they are talked about more widely for performance-based contract analysis, the figure should rise.
However, he concedes that in chartering the market will remain king, although the Oil Companies International Marine Forum (OCIMF) has, as a charterers' representative, been very receptive to the project. The expectation is that eventually owners could be asked to show their "scorecard" when vessels are fixed.
On what is likely to be a web-based system, individual ship data will be entered by owners or managers, initially voluntarily, and the KPIs automatically measured. Some data will be sourced directly from, for example, port-state control using IMO numbers.
"Once we have this database, each ship will be able to measure its KPIs and improvements in performance [or otherwise] over time," said Morel.
It will enable owners to compare ships with all others globally or all those in a certain category, including flag.
Each owner entering vessels will have to contribute to the cost. So far, InterManager has received subsidies to develop the KPIs, with members having contributed also to the development on a voluntary basis.
"My feeling is that this will now go beyond InterManager because it is only one sector of the industry," said Morel. "It will be a project of interest to the whole shipping industry, although there is the issue of who will be the holder and maintainer of the database." The performance of individual ships will only be accessible to the owner or his agent, Morel adds, but statistical material will be open to all database subscribers.