By Dionysis Tzelepis, CEO, DA-Desk, at Marcura
The real problem: maritime decisions still depend on fragmented data
A chartering manager in Piraeus is preparing for a fixture worth millions. She needs to know if the port cost estimate for Santos is realistic, but the last time her vessel called there was over a year ago. The information exists somewhere in archived voyage files, finding it means stopping everything else.
Across the maritime industry, this situation is common. High-stakes operational decisions rely on incomplete intelligence. Not because the data doesn’t exist, but because it lives in siloed systems, unstructured documents, and tools that don’t communicate.
Research shows that up to 75% of operational time is spent gathering, reconciling, and validating information. The real cost isn’t time, it’s uncertainty. When information is fragmented, decisions rely on instinct rather than intelligence.
Where maritime intelligence breaks down
Across the maritime industry, valuable insights are often buried in fragmented systems and disconnected documents.
Contracts and compliance: When reviewing charter parties, overlooking even a single clause can expose operators to significant financial and reputational risk. However, lessons from past disputes rarely make it into a central, searchable format, meaning valuable intelligence is often lost in the ordinary course of business.
Port operations and costs: Operations teams still manually extract figures from PDFs, check charges against past calls and flag anomalies under time pressure. With schedules to keep and vessels waiting for clearance, there’s little opportunity to investigate patterns or benchmark performance.
Procurement and finance: Supplier quotes and agent payments are processed in isolation, without visibility across the wider market. Without a shared reference point, it’s difficult to know whether a price is fair, a charge is standard or a payment detail looks unusual.
From Digitisation to Intelligence
Most operators have digitised documents. PDFs instead of paper. Emails instead of faxes.
But digitisation alone doesn’t create intelligence.
A digital document still requires manual effort to extract meaning.
Operational intelligence means:
The system digests documents automatically
Key data points are extracted and validated
Information is matched against thousands of previous port calls
Outliers and risks are highlighted instantly
Context is added so decisions are informed, not improvised
Yet true intelligence depends on scale. A single company calling at Santos twice a year or Durban once can’t establish what’s “normal”. However, aggregated intelligence drawn from millions of port calls can. With a broader view, operators can spot outliers, benchmark costs, enabling more confident and precise decision-making.
Marcura processes annually:
15 million transactions
200,000+ port calls
6 million SOF events
$17 billion in payments
This scale enables a form of intelligence that individual operators cannot build alone.
While individual customer data remains completely siloed and secured, our aggregated experience across thousands of port calls provides valuable insights into port performance and operations.
From reactive to proactive voyage planning
Read how Lauritzen Bulkers is using data from Marcura to enhance voyage profitability
What operational intelligence looks like in practice
When an operations manager opens a DA for port services, the system automatically shows how it compares to previous calls, same port, similar vessel type, same services.
When a chartering team reviews a major fixture, AI can flag potential risks: “This CP is missing a force majeure clause. Comparable fixtures without it have led to disputes.”
When a finance team approves a payment, it’s already been screened against sanctions lists, verified against beneficiary records and analysed for fraud patterns across billions in payment history. A live sanctions screening check is performed before a payment is released.
This isn’t about replacing human expertise. The chartering manager still decides whether to sign the fixture; the operations manager still approves the DA. Intelligence simply allows them to make those decisions backed by far broader data than any individual could access alone.
Partnership built on trust and human insight
For decades, manual reconciliation was part of learning the business by processing DAs, checking SOFs, understanding where costs hide. In maritime, where complexity is a fact of life, that experience remains invaluable and it’s why we have teams of specialists handling exceptions, ensuring quality and dealing with complex situations. What’s changed is that technology can now handle the mechanical extraction and comparison, freeing skilled professionals to focus on decisions that truly add value.
At Marcura, we handle the mechanical complexity. We identify what’s normal across the industry, what’s an outlier and what’s worth investigating, turning information into actionable intelligence through our advanced proprietary technology.
The competitive advantage ahead
As maritime operations become increasingly data-rich, the competitive advantage will lie not solely in who has the most information, but in who can interpret it fastest and most accurately.
The industry’s next transformation will not come from digitisation alone, but from turning that data into true operational intelligence.
The information already exists. The question is how you’ll turn it into intelligence.
Research shows that up to 75% of operational time is spent gathering, reconciling, and validating information. The real cost isn’t time, it’s uncertainty. When information is fragmented, decisions rely on instinct rather than intelligence.
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