How to respond to a chartering questionnaire in minutes and not days

Published in

Ankeri Solutions

3 min readSep 17, 2019

The prompt response to chartering questionnaires is highly important for every ship owner looking to stay competitive. Unfortunately, responding to the questionnaires can be a source of great pain and frustration. But… there is a fix.

Below are a few solid tips for making light work of responding to the charterer questionnaires in an error free manner that incidentally frees up your time for other important things to do.

I at least believe that every ship owner’s chance of securing new charter parties will improve after following these tips.

So let’s get started.

Consolidate all vessel data into one location and make it accessible to everyone

Build a single version of the truth by consolidating data into one location instead of leaving it lying around in fragmented and siloed file stores and hard drives.

After consolidating the data into one place you should be able to share the data with everyone after assigning the necessary permissions to read or write individual groups of data.

This allows for easier collaboration between employees and departments, instead of following the tried and tested route one of sharing data via email attachments — thus creating multiple copies of data.

Track every change made

It is important to be able to trust the data you use. For that to happen you need to have a system in place that knows the source of the data as well as all updates that have been made, when specified fields were edited, by whom and what values changed.

Make your system robust to adding new fields to you master data

Chartering questionnaires evolve and new fields are added to the questionnaires on regular basis. Charterers have their own preferences on what information to request as well.

When receiving a request for specific piece of data that you do not currently store in your master data list, make sure that your system is able to add this field without hassle, so it can be mapped to the requesting charterer’s field in the questionnaire and all subsequent questionnaires requested by the charterer for other vessels.

Export master data automatically into the questionnaire file format requested by the charterer

Having gone through the work of creating a master data location, instead of manually typing in the values to answer a charterer’s questionnaire in the file format requested, create a process to automatically export the responses into the format required by the charterer.

This will shrink the time needed to respond to the questionnaire from days to minutes with much less chance of clerical input errors occurring.

As an added bonus, if response updates are required, repeating the process from the master data and exporting to the charterer’s questionnaire format again, becomes incredibly simple. So will repeating the process for other vessels requested by the charterer.

Use an API to make vessel data available to the charterer

Even better than exporting the questionnaire responses into the charterer’s required file format, make your data available to the charterer through your very own API with up-to-date master data always ready. Permissions can be granted as needed to cater for you and charterer’s needs.

Using these tips we believe you will be in a much stronger position for responding to every charterers’ questionnaires in a timely and efficient manner without all the headaches involved.

Tasks that might take days or hours to complete will only take minutes or seconds if the right strategy is employed.

Getting there is challenging but thankfully Ankeri has created the Ankeri Platform, a cloud-based software for ship owners and charterers to manage and share ship data and collaborate on improved performance, to help you along on your digital journey.

Originally published at https://www.ankeri.net on September 17, 2019.