Ship Management
Ship management is the day-to-day running of a vessel on behalf of its owner. It spans three functions that are usually staffed separately ashore: technical management (planned maintenance, defects, dry-docking, class and statutory surveys, spares and procurement), crew management (recruitment, certification, rotations, MLC 2006 compliance and payroll) and commercial or operational management (chartering, voyage operations, bunkers, port calls, disbursement accounts and owner accounting).
The same activity is commonly called vessel management or fleet management — the terms are used interchangeably in the market, with "fleet management" tending to be preferred when the emphasis is a whole fleet rather than an individual ship, and "technical management" used when only the engineering and maintenance side is meant. None of them denotes a different discipline.
An owner either manages in-house or appoints a third-party ship manager under a management agreement — BIMCO SHIPMAN being the standard form. The distinction matters beyond commercials: a third-party manager normally holds the Document of Compliance under the ISM Code for the ships it manages and provides the safety management system those ships operate under, so changing manager is a regulatory event as much as a contractual one. In practice the quality of ship management is judged on a short list of hard numbers — port state control detention rate, off-hire days, outstanding conditions of class, and operating expenditure against budget.
Ship management is where an owner's asset either earns or bleeds. The same vessel, on the same trade, can return very different numbers depending on whether maintenance is planned or reactive, whether certificates are tracked before they expire or after a port state control officer finds them, and whether crew changes are scheduled around the trading pattern or scrambled at the last port. It is an unglamorous discipline measured in detentions avoided and off-hire days not taken.
class & surveys · spares
rotations · MLC · payroll
bunkers · port DAs
An owner appoints a third-party manager for technical and crew management of seven vessels, keeping chartering in-house. At handover the manager issues its own Document of Compliance for the ships, and they begin operating under the manager's safety management system.
What changes in practice: a superintendent takes a portfolio of three or four of those ships and becomes the single point of accountability for each. The planned maintenance system is rebuilt from the actual running hours rather than the previous manager's calendar, deferred jobs are surfaced as a backlog with a cost attached, and every certificate on board is loaded with its expiry so the ninety-day window is visible ashore rather than discovered at a port state control inspection. Crew rotations get planned against the trading pattern so reliefs happen at ports where they are cheap and visas already exist.
What the owner sees is a monthly operating statement against an agreed budget, per vessel, with the maintenance backlog and outstanding conditions of class carried as explicit line items rather than a surprise at the next dry-docking.
What does ship management include?
Three functions: technical management (planned maintenance, defects, dry-docking, class and statutory surveys, spares and procurement), crew management (recruitment, certification, rotations, MLC 2006 and payroll), and commercial or operational management (chartering, voyage operations, bunkers, port calls and owner accounting).
What is the difference between ship management, vessel management and fleet management?
In everyday use, none — they describe the same discipline. "Fleet management" tends to be used when the emphasis is the whole fleet rather than a single ship, and "technical management" when only the engineering and maintenance side is meant. Buyers of software search for all three interchangeably.
What is third-party ship management?
An arrangement where the owner appoints a specialist management company to run the vessels rather than doing it in-house, usually under the BIMCO SHIPMAN standard agreement. The manager typically holds the Document of Compliance under the ISM Code for those ships and supplies the safety management system they operate under.
How is ship management performance measured?
On a short list of hard numbers: port state control detention and deficiency rate, off-hire days, outstanding conditions of class, planned-maintenance backlog, crew retention, and operating expenditure against the agreed budget.