• "Pages has revolutionised the way we do business and put our brand into new markets that would not have been possible using any other channel."

    Greg Pech, CEO
    Satellite Phone Store

  • "ShipServ is a vital tool for us as a leading European ship chandler and we need to be highly visible in the ports we serve as it is used by all the leading shipping companies."

    George Saris, President
    Atlas Ship Chandlers

  • "We started to use TradeNet just to save time and stop manual typing of orders, but now we get other substantial benefits including vital benchmark data on suppliers’ response times that help us in all our negotiations."

    Knut Ove Thuland Hansen, Purchasing Manager
    Utkilen

  • "Time is the biggest saving through ShipServ. We have detailed data that tells us that the amount of time we spend per vessel each week has dropped from 9.2 hours to 7.9 hours."

    Richard O'Malley, Purchasing Supervisor
    Crowley Maritime

  • "Encouraging our suppliers to adopt the e-commerce platform has been well worth the effort. We have reaped significant cost savings from streamlining our purchasing processes."

    Charles Ong, Purchasing Manager
    Keppel Shipyard

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4 March 2009

How many marine purchasers does it take (to change a light bulb)?

Calling all maritime purchasers – I NEED HELP!

Whilst the increase in the usage of our ShipServ Pages maritime supplier directory has been impressive, I’m interested in working out just how many times a day/week/month/year purchasers need to turn to a directory like Pages to find a new maritime supplier?

I’m looking for some help here, but I reckon that as a whole the global maritime purchasing community is faced with 2.3 million “sourcing predicaments” per year – that‘s where a buyer somewhere in the world finds themselves hunting for a new supplier (and as a result needs assistance from a product like Pages).

So, how did I come to this number?

Well, firstly I reckon there are about 11,200 ‘proper’ marine purchasers out there. This is based on taking the size of the world fleet (80,030 vessels over 100t) and dividing it by what our own experience shows as the average number of vessels typically managed per purchaser: 7.1. (For now, lets ignore all the chandlers, technical staff, crews and non-marine purchasers who also buy from the same supplier base).

Our market research then shows that the average purchaser receives ten requisitions per vessel per week and they need to search to find a supplier for 1 in 15 of these – that’s a tad over 50,000 sourcing predicaments per week, or 2.3m per year!

This means that the average purchaser finds themselves hunting for a supplier of maritime supplies at least 4 times per week.

So the question is, do these numbers sound right? Are there more/less purchasers/vessels out there? Is finding a supplier a more frequent or less frequent activity? Can anyone share some real experiences? I’m very keen to hear what ‘proper’ purchasers have to say on this!

- Stuart May, Director of Product Management, ShipServ

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 4th, 2009 at 6:50 pm.

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