Benchmark your performance

Performance, as we say, is everything. Increase performance and you reduce emissions, save costs, improve reliability, and ultimately better please your customers. Businesses are always striving for high performance, from earnings per voyage to burning the least amount of fuel per mile. But how does a company determine whether it is successful?

Through the benchmarking process, any business can compare itself against a standard and develop a consistent way of measuring performance. See how.

What is benchmarking?

In business, benchmarking is a process used to measure the quality and performance of your company’s people, vessels, services, and processes. These measurements don’t have much value on their own—that data needs to be compared against some sort of standard. A benchmark.

For example, suppose it takes 30 MT to sail 10 miles with a certain cargo load. Is the 30-MT measurement good or bad? The only way for you to know is to compare against other data, such as the time it takes another vessel to sail a similar distance. If another vessel can sail the same distance with the same load in the same weather conditions in less than 30 MT, you can use their consumption rate as a benchmark for measuring your vessel.

The objective of benchmarking is to use the data gathered in your benchmarking process to identify areas where improvements can be made.

Common areas that you may want to target for benchmarking analysis include fuel per mile, fuel per ton-mile, speed through water. The performance metrics you get from these targets can be compared against others to help you determine best practices for improving your operations.

Why is benchmarking important?

The goal of your business should be to improve processes,  decrease costs, and earn more money. Benchmarking is one of many tools you can use as part of any continuous improvement model used within your organization.

We help with benchmarking the consumption of your chartered vessels. Each voyage, we automatically benchmark the reported fuel consumption against our benchmark, the Digital Twin.

The Digital Twin offers a solution to benchmark noon-reported fuel consumption and related emissions of any (chartered) vessel – in real-time.

An example is given below.  It can be seen that the reported fuel consumption (green dotted line) is (very) stable. It's also very hard to see why the first part is lower than the second part.

If we plot the noon-reported fuel consumption against reported average speed, it is clear to see from the trend line that the reported data cannot be trusted to give an accurate picture of fuel consumption.

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We4Sea has now made a huge step forward compared to the traditional noon-reports. Using our unique, in-house developed Digital Twin concept, we have developed a radical new way of monitoring sea-going ships. We benchmark reported consumption, using real-time weather, draft and speed data. This allows you to make plausibility checks on reported consumption.

The example below shows that the noon-reported consumption is clearly exceeding the consumption you may expect (the blue line).  The blue line already takes into account the speed sailed (STW), draft and weather, so deviations are either inefficiencies (like aging, fouling. mechanical issues), or bad reporting. Hull fouling proved to be issue in this particular case, causing about 7MT of additional consumption per day.

Analyse your noon-reports in real-time and save bunkers!

Our software can be used to detect overconsumption in (near) real-time, and uses Smart Alerts to notify you. Allowing you to take necessary actions, and supply needed data to support in performance assessments.

Consistent benchmarking can help you increase efficiency and lower costs, making your business more profitable.

Interested how? Contact us for a short meeting, happy to discuss how benchmarking can help your business.