Vessel planning is like playing a high-stakes game of Tetris, only each piece comes from a different team, on a different schedule, and in a different format. Coordinating all of this to ensure optimal fleet productivity is a complex challenge.
Sales, engineering, project management and operations each manage overlapping time-sensitive activities from contracts to tenders to crew changes and audits…the list goes on. Often, this information is spread across a variety of spreadsheets and systems such as CRMs, Planned Maintenance (PMS), class society portals and crewing software.
Such scattered planning information makes it difficult for different departments to collaborate proactively. Even worse, it leads to the schedule being managed in a reactive manner which leads to sub-optimal decisions.
Spinergie’s Vessel Planning module is built to accommodate the needs of the maritime sector and centralizes all your fleet planning activities. This aligns your teams with every decision and maximizes your commercial performance.
The Vessel Planning module helps optimize fleet utilization by:
- Providing at-a-glance vessel availability for tender responses or maintenance planning.
- Managing planning changes following a client request, operational necessity or weather.
- Showing scheduling conflicts before they cause disruption.
- Supporting financial forecasts with reliable utilization, bookings and shipyard time data.
- Anticipating cold stack needs to reduce idle costs.
- Minimizing downtime by bundling technical and regulatory tasks.
How will my team use Vessel Planning?
Case Study One: centralizing commercial information
A vessel manager sought a solution that would help their various teams align their vessel planning needs.
They had previously undertaken commercial planning tasks by manually updating separate vessel spreadsheets with data from their CRM platform alongside other sources. But this manual process siloed their data. This process was error-prone while consolidating vessel schedules was both time-consuming and lacked cross-team functionality.
With these old, complicated processes….
- Planning managers were burdened with a heavily manual process with a high risk of human error.
- Project managers couldn’t easily assess and mitigate scheduling impacts from project delays.
- Sales teams lacked real-time visibility into vessel availability for client planning.
- Sales leadership had no centralized view of fleet utilization, limiting revenue forecasting.
By choosing to incorporate Spinergie’s Vessel Planning module into their fleet management workflow, the client centralized their planning data. This eliminated the need for multiple spreadsheets and aligned all teams around a live, shared view of their fleet.
With the new efficient Vessel Planning process…
- Planning managers receive automatically updated schedules with a consolidated view across the fleet.
- Project managers reschedule with full visibility of potential business impact.
- Sales teams see real-time availability enabling collaborative client planning.
- Sales leadership gains instant insight into utilization and revenue potential.
The client now has the ability to maximize fleet utilization with more precise planning decisions.
Case Study Two: preventing planning conflicts
A second SFM client, another vessel manager, had recently found themselves with a double booking caused by scattered data. The double booking then resulted in a hastily rearranged drydocking without all required parts being available.
This avoidable disruption highlighted a deeper issue for them.
- Tech teams were struggling to prevent conflicts between contracts, inspections and maintenance.
- This sometimes led to certificate renewals not always being aligned with drydock timelines, risking expiration.
- Sales leadership lacked a clear view of how planned downtime would affect revenue.
- Ops leadership needed more clarity into positioning the right assets in the right places.
- Sales teams wanted insight into how backlog was distributed across regions, clients and work scopes.
Vessel Planning centralized all the client’s planning across teams and timelines giving all a shared view of contracts, maintenance, inspections and commercial priorities.
Key benefits to the client:
- Conflicts are flagged early, giving tech teams time to act.
- Drydock planning is now coordinated with certifications.
- Leadership has access to a live schedule with a view of commercial backlog and downtime.
- Assets are better deployed across contracts to alleviate “white space” in the schedule.
The client now operates without surprises like double bookings, and they have better foresight and alignment between teams.
Product Features
Data can be viewed in three different ways: an easy-to-read timeline for quick access to key information; high-level data within KPI dashboards and granular data within utilization analysis.
Timeline view
- Add planned events directly into the application with user-friendly forms.
- Sync data from APIs for a single source of truth and add further activities manually where required.
- Easily identify available days and plan the most efficient dates for drydock stays and maintenance periods with a visual, user-friendly schedule interface.
- Integrated, toggleable viewing to see DPR or activities information for an actual vs planned comparison.
- Can be easily exported and shared with clients for increased collaboration.
High-level KPIs
- At-a-glance view of high-level company-specific KPIs like booked or available days that can be customized to your requirements.
- Filtered KPI viewing to access insights for your entire fleet or by vessel / vessel type.
- Compare each KPI to key business objectives and targets.
Utilization analysis
- Immediate visibility of the next year, quarter or month.
- Analyze work scopes by customer, job type or regions
- Use data visualization tools to get insights per vessel, customer or job type.
- Generate recurring utilization reports to be sent directly to your inbox.
Misalignment of vessel availability, maintenance and commercial commitments causes lost opportunities and unexpected costs. However, by centralizing your vessel planning you can achieve better coordination, higher vessel utilization, improved forecasting and greater confidence in your strategic decisions.
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