Dataloy VMS integrates with BunkerPlanner

With fuel costs making up nearly 60% of a vessel’s operating costs, there is immense pressure to reduce the cost of bunkering. Because profit margins in the shipping business are often in the single digits, even a modest reduction in overall bunker costs would have a marked impact on the bottom line. Reducing bunker costs can be a critical step in creating and sustaining competitive advantage.

Bunker procurement is a complex task because of all the elements that go into each purchasing decision: vessel speed, consumption of different grades, bunker prices at multiple ports, ECAs, tank capacities, and reserve requirements, to name a few.

Bunker procurement professionals are under intense time pressure daily. They, therefore, rely on rules of thumb – such as purchasing only at a handful of traditional bunkering ports – to mitigate this complexity.

However, with increasing environmental regulations, price volatility, and new fuel grades, these rules of thumb may lead to uneconomical decisions. A proper evaluation of all the relevant bunkering alternatives might save tens of thousands of dollars on a single voyage, yet in most cases, these alternatives will go unexplored.

As per Fernando Alvarez, co-founder and CTO of BunkerMetric, BunkerPlanner’s advanced algorithms collect all necessary data and crunch through hundreds of alternative procurement plans. The top alternatives are then presented to the planners, who have the discretion to refine the plan using an intuitive web-based user interface. The result is the best of both worlds – enabling planners to make better decisions based on their considerable expertise, while BunkerPlanner’s algorithms ensure an unbiased and consistent assessment of all attractive fueling alternatives.

BunkerMetric intends that the integration with Dataloy will further facilitate the process by expediting the use of the latest vessel and voyage information stored in the client’s VMS. BunkerPlanner automatically exports the chosen bunkering plans for further processing in Dataloy VMS. This integration will help the customers to unlock the value of an optimised procurement process through strategic sourcing, helping in cost optimisation, bunker procurement savings, and reducing business risk and volatility.