workflow optimisation made easy

SOFeXchange

Statements of Facts have traditionally been delivered from Agents, Masters and Inspectors in a wide variety of formats. These differ from port-to-port and vessel-to-vessel with little or no consistency. Transcribing these into a Voyage Management System(VMS) or a Laytime Calculator has long been a troublesome process fraught with typographical errors. This results in slow processing, delays in collecting demurrage and calculation errors.

 

SOFeXchange changes this. It provides one single place to enter events in real time. All parties who enter the events can see them in real time. Intelligent processing of events assists in improving both the speed and ease of entry. SOFeXchange is a resource shared between all parties.

 

The users of the SOF – the Owner, Charterer and Trading Partners – can all see the SOF as it is created. This means that demurrage processing can commence as soon as the SOF is signed. It is not necessary to wait until the SOF is sent to you by a hub agency, or until you receive the SOF as part of a claim. This means that accurate demurrage costs can be included in trading Profit and Loss accounts, rather than estimates. The SOF can be downloaded in any format that suits the business needs. SOFeXchange will do any conversion in format or event coding for you. SOFeXchange will provide the data either as a list of events, or as a laytime sheet. SOFeXchange can also add weekend periods into the laytime sheet, in any one of 37 different SHEX definitions.

 

SOFeXchange is fully integrated with CMS from HUBSE, meaning that users of CMS can directly import the Statement of Facts with no additional steps necessary.

SOFeXchange has a full Application Programming Interface (API). This allows customers to create the voyage set-up direct from the Voyage Management System (VMS). The events can be pulled from SOFeXchange or SOFeXchange can push these to your application. Osiris Consultants will assist in integration work and can add client specific RESTful API calls.

Providers

of SOFeXchange

 For people who fill out and supply the SOF, such as Masters, Agents, Inspectors, and Surveyors usage of SOFeXchange is totally free. There is no requirement to sign up to the application. There is no software to download. You will be invited via email to port calls by the Owner or Charterer. It will run on any standard web browser, on a desktop, mobile phone or tablet. Custom application for iPhones, iPad and Android devices are in product plans.

Consumers

of SOFeXchange

The consumers are people who make use of the Statement of Facts to compute or verify demurrage claims. There is a single fee for using the SOF at each port, but you can download the SOF in as many formats as many times as you choose.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

Statement of facts process

Cost of SOFeXchange

There is a charge of USD $25 per port call. This allows unlimited downloads in any format, any number of times. The download is not to be reused or shared outside of the company, but can be used throughout the organisation.

Benefits and Returns

Assume Demurrage is USD 20,000 PDPR. The SOF is 25/20,000 = 0.00125 days = 2 minutes. If we save 2 minutes per port call then we have made a positive difference by more accurate data.

Benefits and Returns

  • Assume a clerk takes 1 hour to input and check a completed SOF that can be retyped into a Demurrage Calculator from a PDF file. A clerk’s salary could be £30,000 per annum, so true employment costs would be double this, say, £60,000 per annum. Assuming 220 days with 7.5 hours worked per day, this gives the clerk an hourly rate of around £36 (or $48 per hour). With SOFeXchange this work can be done in seconds because the SOF is presented in the format best suited to the Demurrage Calculator, and there need be no retyping at all.  Thus, the clerks time is saved.
 
  • If a company has 10 vessels, each of which, on average,  performs a voyage every 20 days, there will be about 180 voyages per year. As each voyage has at least one load and one discharge, there will be in the region of 350 port calls per year. Hence the annual cost for SOF is $8,750. If delays, errors,  incorrect SOFs, etc,  result in 1 in 1000 claims that failure (a failure rate of 0.1%), that means one claim is fully lost every 3 years. If the cost of such a claim is a loss in demurrage of $50,000, this is a return on investment of 47%.
 
  • SOFs have traditionally been rounded to the nearest 6 minutes. There is no reason for this other than the fact that it is industry practice. SOFeXchange encourages accurate recording of event times. Even with a low demurrage rate of, say, $10,000 PDPR, a saving of anything over 7 minutes per port call will result in a pay back.  For larger vessels, where port stays are much longer, the potential savings are substantially higher.
 
  • Having the completed SOF available via SOFeXchange,  immediately the port call completes, allows the demurrage team to complete a claim without the delay that they experience today. This results in trading PnL’s being accurate, instead of relying on estimated demurrage data. That improves management reporting of trading positions.
 
  • The timely availability of the SOF allows for invoicing to happen faster than at present. This means the estimated returns can be actualised and the counter party becomes a trade debtor far sooner. Being able to collect the money earlier results in an improved cash flow position.

SOFeXchange – The Legacy Process

Port Logs or Statements of Facts (SOF) are currently produced by multiple parties in a variety of formats, including PDFs, Excel Spreadsheets and even hand-written documents. Time and effort are required to collate and reconcile these statements before they can be applied to calculations. They are rarely incorporated easily into the company’s Laytime Calculator. Often the document must be manually reformatted, the data extracted, or details from the SOF manually retyped. This takes time to do, uses valuable manpower doing little more than copy typing, and often introduces errors into the calculation. In a simple trade you can see that the SOF is retyped four times (orange boxes).

 

How SOFeXchange Improves This Process

With SOFeXchange the final statement is available as soon as the port call is completed. This means a substantial reduction in the time it takes to start a laytime calculation. There is the added benefit that SOFeXchange will deliver the SOF as soon as the Master completes it, rather than having to wait for it to be sent via an Agency.This means that companies issuing demurrage claims can do so far more quickly. For trading companies, it means that there is no longer a need to put an estimate of the demurrage into the trading accounts. Now they can do the complete demurrage calculation immediately and these trading accounts are accurate and have real numbers in them. There is no need to type or transcribe any Statement of Facts when SOFeXchange is used.

About Osiris Consultants Ltd.

With over 20 years of working in the commercial maritime sector, Osiris has taken its first step to deliver a high quality application to improve the logistics trading process. Having worked with Owners, Charters, and Software Suppliers, Osiris has a real in-depth understanding of the difficulties the industry faces and has taken tangible steps to make a transformational difference.

Contact us today

Osiris Consultants Ltd.

+44 7860 290883

107 Blackheath Park, London, SE3 0EX

Support@sofexchange

.atlassian.net

Office Hours 9:00AM – 17:00PM GMT

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