In this study, we investigate the barriers and enablers companies face when they seek to establish a fully decarbonized supply chain from the ground up. While recent research on sustainable supply chain management has advanced our understanding of how existing supply chains can become more sustainable, there is less research on fully decarbonized supply chains that are designed carbon neutral to produce carbon neutral products. This research aims to expand that frontier by investigating the case of the emerging supply chain delivering fossil-neutral e- methanol to the shipping industry.
Having the right spare part at the right time to the right place for ship maintenance to the minimal possible costs is an exigent management problem that maritime shipping companies face. This is especially challenging in bulk shipping where routes are not fixed, but subsequent port calls depend on spot market dynamics. Thus, spare parts allocation ahead in time is limited, but possible if failures rates of ship components and their timing can be foreseen, so that spare parts can be allocated to hedge against the risk of long waiting times and thus ship downtimes. Thus, monitoring the condition of components key to the ships performance is essential to the task. This can enable companies to significantly reduce operational costs of their fleet leading to a competitive advantage in a highly volatile market regarding demand and demand-driven freight rates.
However, shipping companies seem far away from applying such methods due to various challenges ranging from data gathering and cultivating an understanding of data quality needs, adaptation to move from preventive towards predictive and condition-based monitoring, and the introduction and application of decision support tools for sourcing, spare parts allocation, and inventory management.
In this paper, we investigate the current state of the art of maintenance and related spare parts logistics management for maritime shipping and discuss the application of methods to the bulk carriage market. We add practical knowledge from case companies and discuss how challenges can be overcome in providing guidelines for companies.
This paper studies the design of a mid-scale maritime supply chain for distribution of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from overseas sourcing locations, via a storage located at the coast, before transporting the LNG on land to industrial customers. The case company has signed contracts with a number of initial customers and expect that there will be more customers and increased demand in the years to come. However, it is currently uncertain whether and when new contracts will be signed. To capture this uncertainty with regard to which and how many future customers there will be, which directly affects the demand, we propose a multi-stage stochastic programming model, which maximizes the expected profits of the supply chain. The model aims at aiding decisions concerning the import of LNG, investments in floating storage units and customer distribution systems, and it has been applied on a real case study for distributing LNG to customers in a Brazilian state. It is shown that explicitly considering uncertainty in the modeling of this problem is very important, with a Value of Stochastic Solution of 13.2%, and that there are significant economies of scale in this supply chain. Most importantly, the multi-stage stochastic programming model and the analysis presented in this paper provided valuable decision support and managerial insights for the case company in its process of setting up the LNG supply chain.
Reduction of carbon emissions is a societal challenge that demands concerted efforts. The maritime industry is no exception. This paper takes an ecosystem perspective and considers the question of how to enact the green transition of the maritime industry and explore the barriers and enablers of that goal. To this end, we conduct an exploratory case-study to investigate the maritime value chain by focusing on 9 major stakeholders and conducting more than 20 interviews. Our study reveals four continuous enablers and two essential enablers to establishing a functional green maritime ecosystem.
Exploring how transnational environmental governance and the operation of global value chains (GVCs) intersect is key in explaining the circumstances under which mandatory disclosure can improve the environmental footprint of business operations. We investigate how the governance dynamics of the tanker shipping value chain (a major emitter of greenhouse gases) limits the effectiveness of the European Union (EU) monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) regulation, which mandates the disclosure of greenhouse gas emissions for ships calling at EU ports. Although MRV seeks to help shipowners and ship managers save fuel and reduce emissions, it does not address the complexity of power relations along the tanker shipping value chain and currently cannot disentangle how different actors influence the design, operational, commercial, and ocean/weather factors that together determine fuel consumption. In particular, the EU MRV neglects to reflect on how oil majors exert their power and impose their commercial priorities on other actors, and thus co-determine fuel use levels. We conclude that, in its current form, the EU MRV is unlikely to lead to significant environmental upgrading in tanker shipping. More generally, we argue that regulators seeking to facilitate environmental upgrading need to expand their focus beyond the unwanted behaviors of producers of goods and providers of services to also address the incentive structures and demands placed on them by global buyers.
This white paper shows how small and medium sized companies (SME) involved in supply chains affiliated to the maritime industry and port industrial areas are challenged by the diffusion of technologies and managerial principles associated with Industry 4.0 with a special focus on blockchain technology. Blockchain technology creates potential for added value through transparency and auditability of data flows that arise through system decentralization, where intermediary parties such as a central authority will not store data or verify transactions. Instead of conventional workflows, the technology brings new approaches to collaboration by combining multiple parties with equality of data ownership. In doing so, blockchain technology challenges conventional rules of data ownership.
While attention on blockchain technology has been increasing, most blockchain projects are still under development. However, the technology gained ground in areas such as healthcare, governance, and supply chain management. This white paper focuses on the potentials and challenges of blockchain technology in maritime related supply chains.
Based on a discussion of industry preparedness for Industry 4.0, a taxonomy of blockchain adoption is presented. The taxonomy is based on two dimensions including: (1) the digital complexity of internal activities and (2) the degree of value chain integration between actors in the supply chain. The dimensions encompass four archetypes of behavior on blockchain adoption that are applied in the following analysis.
The potential for blockchain technology is increasingly evident in supply chain logistics and manufacturing that is often located in industrial areas such as ports. By studying blockchain potentials in Danish maritime SMEs, the findings reflect the currently limited insight into blockchain technology from the point of view of business actors. As shown in the study of three Danish supply chains, containers, seafood and recirculated plastics, there are low-hanging potentials to be realized through changes to the current technologies and systems in application.
This chapter presents the latest development in digital platforms for data sharing in Maritime Informatics as discussed in chapter 1—Responding to humanitarian and global concerns with digitally enabled supply chain visibility. Specifically, we use the TradeLens digital data sharing platform as a case study to illustrate the key actors in containerised global transport and the technical set-up (including the utilisation of a hybrid cloud, permissioned blockchain, and data exchange standards), the benefits and challenges for the individual types of actors, and the overall potential and future challenges of the TradeLens platform.
The potential of data sharing platforms is dependent on the wide adoption of the ecosystem. Today, there is a high interest for the TradeLens ecosystem, and many actors have already adopted the platform, due to the vast variety of benefits it provides to all actors in global trade. Regardless, some actors seem to face internal obstacles to adopting the platform, which are either low or high technical advancement. For these actors, a paradigm shift is necessary to move from a reactive to a proactive scheme enabled by a near real-time supply and logistics data network. Finally, we discuss the challenges of network collaboration.
The report is organized as follows. The introduction will lay out the current state-of-play of eco-efficiency and the zeitgeist of the current situation on maritime that we find ourselves in, in 2020. The next section will provide some historical context looking back to 2010 and 2000 to trace the trajectory and developmental course on which we are. The core contribution of this report is the Maritime Operations Roadmap that can be found in Figure 1 on page 9. This illustration plots the expectations for technological capabilities and policy from 2020 to 2030.
Acknowledgments: I thank Amanda Bille, Anna Land, Attila Marton, Britta Gammelgaard, Carl Marcus Wallenburg, Christian Durach, Christian Hendriksen, Christian Huber, Dane Pflueger, Elise Berlinski, Florian Kock, Frank Fürstenberg, Helen Peck, Ida Schrøder, Ingo Zettler, Jan Mouritsen, Jane Lister, Jennifer Rogan, Johan Lundin, Kamilla Barat, Lisa Paulsen, Lorraine van Halewijn, Marin Jovanovic, Michael Herburger, Paola Trevisan, Philip Beske-Janssen, Regina Brogna, Stefano Ponte, and Thomas Johnsen for their helpful suggestions and comments. I also thank Journal of Supply Chain Management’s editorial team, especially Mark Pagell and the anonymous associate editor, for their exceptionally constructive and thoughtful guidance. In particular, I thank Günther Metzger and Jean François Bianco, who have been very inspirational throughout my thought process. This research resulted from a collaboration between Copenhagen Business School and Nordakademie.
Ship recycling refers to the process of dismantling vessels with the purpose of extracting and recovering materials for reuse, particularly the steel. The aim of this paper is to map the supply chain of ship recycling. This exploratory and qualitative research provides a glimpse on how regulations influence the supply chain management through inter-organizational arrangements. It considers the trade-offs and combinations of financial and sustainable values that, in many ways, determine these inter-organizational arrangements. Preliminary findings show that there are conflicts of interest with the ship recycling stakeholders. Although compliance of regulations should foster better transparency in the supply chain, these regulations have not yet fully embraced social aspects, such as the fact that domestic demand and supply for steel, as well as many jobs, are dependent on this industry. On the contrary, the initiatives to regulate ship recycling might induce negative effects. This paper suggests that transaction costs analysis and the principal agency theory are two complementary theories for analyzing inter-organizational relationships in the supply chain of ship recycling.