Daily Maersk case
By introducing absolute reliability, Maersk Line is writing the next chapter in shipping history
Thinking outside-in
Conveyor belt between Daily Maersk ports Feeder and Intermodel connections to the conveyor belt Daily cut-offs in (origin) ports Promised transport times between ports
Felixstowe Bremerhaven Rotterdam
Shanghai Ningbo Yantian
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here once was a time when you could set your watch by the horn of a vessel in the harbour. Those days are over, as today only one out of two vessels arrive on time. For Maersk Line, these circumstances are not good enough. The company has adopted an outside-in approach to completely rethink the operational model and return to the old virtues of absolute reliability. “Through the outside-in approach, we’ve gained a clear understanding of what really matters to our customers: reliability. They don’t care whether our vessels are on time – they care about on-time availability of the cargo. As a direct response to this, we initiated the Daily Maersk project to create an underlying operational model built on the needs of our customers”, Ole Pradsgaard, Project Lead, Daily Maersk, explains.
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et’s explore the industry’s history to truly appreciate the efforts behind the Daily Maersk initiative: it all started in 1955, when Malcolm P. McLean, a trucking entrepreneur from North Carolina, the US, bought a steamship company with the idea of transporting entire truck trailers with their cargo still inside. He had realised that it would be much simpler and quicker to have one container that could be lifted from a vehicle directly on to a ship without first having to unload its contents. His theory was that efficiency could be vastly improved through a system of “intermodalism”, in which the same container with the same cargo could be transported with minimum interruption via different transport modes during its journey. Containers could be moved seamlessly between ships, trucks and trains. This would simplify the whole logistical process, and eventually the implementation of this idea led to a revolution in cargo transport and international trade over the next 50 years.
Tanjung Pelepas
With the launch of Daily Maersk, Maersk Line is pushing the efficiency agenda even further and writing the next chapter in the history of “containerisation”. And this history hasn’t otherwise changed much since the mid-90s when weekly port calls were introduced.
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ased on more than 100 interviews with some of the world’s largest companies, Maersk Line created a product with daily calls (the industry standard is weekly calls) from four ports in Asia, a virtual “conveyer belt” with 70 of the largest vessels in constant rotation and a binding promise on the total transport time. To live up to the promise, Daily Maersk combines seven strings from four ports in Asia to three in Europe into one network enabled by a series of back-up plans in case of unforeseen events. “Our customers no longer need to care about vessel departure time, transit time, waiting time or delays; all they need to care about is transport time – the time from cut-off to cargo availability at the destination. Their businesses depend on the reliability of our services. If the cargo is delivered late, it affects their entire supply chain. Our research revealed that if the cargo is delivered on time every time, our customers will eventually view shipping as an extension of the production line. Their supply chain costs would be lowered significantly by reducing the needs for on-land storage, working capital and administration costs,” Ole Pradsgaard continues.
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aily Maersk was launched in October 2011, and already the results are impressive. In the last quarter of 2011, the on-time delivery of cargo was 98 per cent which is significantly above the industry average. On the trade between Asia and Europe, the headhaul and backhaul cargo volumes increased by 15 per cent and 17 per cent respectively compared to 2010. Read more at www.dailymaersk.com
Ole Pradsgaard,
Project Lead, Daily Maersk