During 2005 ShipServ’s clients increased their transactions using TradeNet by 266%, making it threshold year for the company. While it took about 5 years for the 1st million transactions to take place (by mid-2005), the six months to year-end 2005, saw the completion of the next 500,000 transactions – a massive increase on the previous 5 years and further evidence of ever increasing customer acceptance. A million transactions represent an enormous saving in resources, both physical (paper) and in manpower, not to mention associated costs. It is equivalent to a pile of paper the height of the Eiffel Tower. Laid end-to-end the paper would stretch from the Eiffel Tower to St Peter’s in Rome (1100 km).
The rapidly growing acceptance of conducting business over the independent web-based trading platform TradeNet has come about because customers have been able to prove to themselves the savings in time and manpower that e-commerce can provide. ShipServ’s trading platform is easily adaptable to the majority of existing ship management software, a factor that has made it easy to persuade potential customers to use ShipServ’s e-commerce solutions.
Over the past 12 months, a significant number of customers have joined ShipServ, with the number of fleets connected to TradeNet increasing from 31 to over 50, representing an active fleet of some 1,500 ships. This represents more than 5% of the world’s ocean-going fleet of over 5,000 grt. ShipServ’s CEO, Paul Østergaard, predicts successful year “We believe that in 2006, ShipServ’s 5,000+ suppliers will sell as much as US$0.75 billion dollars worth of goods. This means that some 7,000 transactions will be made every working day by our 12,000 users spread over 90 countries.”
As additional added value, ShipServ is now offering its members Key Performance Indicators (KPI) tracking, whereby buyers can now benchmark themselves against various average performance levels and similarly, suppliers can track their own performance on such measures as speed of response, number of requests for quotes (RFQs) per order etc. As a result of KPI, buyers have reported that they are pleased with the increasing positive responses from suppliers within the system – e.g. in the last quarter of 2005, up to 56% of suppliers replied within one day to RFQs received.
