Crewing activities — When should you insource/outsource your operations?

During recent meetings with ship managers and owners, we realized that the majority are still outsourcing their crewing operations and not considering the additional costs of this. Due to the challenges of controlling recruitment activities, managing expenses, planning the rotation and ensuring seafarers well-being, there has been a number of owners who have decided to hand this task over to specialized crewing providers. In comparison, technical management or operational activities are rarely outsourced due to the arduous nature of the task. So why is the manning operation so unpopular among mid-sized shipowners?

Budgeting — Checking on a potential crewing project

The budgets for in house crewing activities are hardly ever discussed, even if the companies fleet is steadily growing. This might be for the simple reason that “its always been done like this”, or the project has never caught the manager’s attention so is flying under the radar. The best approach is to consider if it saves money and a shipping company is able to market more in house products, why not check with a potential cost calculation? Surely, crewing providers are doing a great job in ensuring quality on board, however crewing can always be set up ship by ship.‌‌

Finding the right manning agency

Most agents supplying crew, are not located in the same cities as the owners. The effort to identify the right agent, to define the correct crewing procedure as well as checking on legal requirements is not done overnight. In addition, there is a certain risk in using a newly found agency even if only used for 2–3 cadets at first.‌‌ How can this be mitigated?

Administration effort

There is significant administration work to be tackled by any crewing manager. Using multiple manning agents along with different processes which have been created for onboarding seafarers. Equally important, these agencies have to be audited on a regular basis to ensure their service quality, which overall is immensely time-consuming for the crew manager. Various challenges lead to a shipowners decision to not implement crewing in their organization with standardizing these processes on a global scale being impossible.

Working with Martide enable companies to access a multinational crew pool of audited Manning agents within our “Approved Partner Network”. By simply signing up, we are able to standardize your crewing process with our custom tools, select manning agents on a global scale and recruit seafarers within minutes. With no fixed costs, access the platform can be charged per seafarer per month. To reduce your workload to a minimum we make sure to include your expectations into our yearly audits. Ultimately have access to multinational crew, examined within your scope, by just auditing the Martide office. Focus on crewing, not on administration.

If you like to have a chat on potential cooperation and are interested to set up your own crewing department, I am happy to discuss budgets and relevant manning requirements with you. Just leave an email to bizdev@martide.com