Stolt Tankers Puts Around One Hundred Ships On A Shared Procurement Platform
Stolt Tankers has rolled out a third-party electronic procurement platform across roughly 100 deep-sea vessels, with the systems live since June. The move replaces an internally developed procurement system that is now due to be retired, and marks a shift from bespoke in-house software towards a shared industry platform.
The provider has built a contracts management feature specifically for the operator, giving a central repository for tenders and contracts and allowing agreements with suppliers to be evaluated against one another. The module can also generate requests for quotation and purchase orders automatically for contracted items or preselected suppliers, which removes a substantial volume of manual work from superintendents and purchasing staff.
The commercial case rests on two things that are difficult to achieve with in-house systems. The first is cycle time: shortening the interval between a vessel raising a requisition and the goods arriving reduces the risk of a ship waiting on a part. The second is visibility of what has actually been contracted, which is where fleet-wide procurement typically leaks value, as individual vessels buy at spot prices items that are already covered by a negotiated agreement nobody on board can easily see.
Scale is the reason platforms of this kind have gained ground. The system now supports more than 2,600 vessels operated by over 115 owners, operators and managers, which gives suppliers a single channel into a large share of the market and gives buyers comparative data no single fleet could generate alone. That network effect is the same dynamic that has consolidated port agency, bunker procurement and crew management onto shared platforms over the past decade.
Retiring a proprietary system is the more revealing part of the decision. Fleets that built their own procurement tools did so when nothing suitable existed, and those systems accumulate embedded working practices that are expensive to maintain and harder still to modernise as regulatory and reporting demands grow. Choosing to move to an external platform accepts a degree of dependency on a supplier in exchange for development costs shared across the industry, a trade-off more owners have been willing to make as software has become a larger share of the cost of running a fleet.
