Over the past 100 years, maritime shipping has changed considerably, but many risks are still part and parcel of maritime transport. Transport damage is a good example of this and continues to be part of everyday life for many shipping companies. Good risk management and better data utilisation and analysis can help here and reduce damage to goods and products. Experts agree that although the shipping industry generates a lot of data, it could analyse it better and make better use of the insights and warnings it receives in real time: By analysing data around the clock, for example, new insights could be gained into the environmental conditions that prevail during a sea transport and trends could be derived that contribute to reducing damage.
Risks in cargo safety during maritime transport
Cargo securing plays a major role here: strong forces act on a container ship on the high seas. Depending on the swell, it rotates around its axles to varying degrees. Rolling movements, for example, can lead to extreme acceleration and cause considerable damage to the goods in the container. In strong waves, it is not uncommon for a container ship to lean to one side by more than 30 metres. This can cause the container fastenings to tear, meaning that a heavy machine in rolling seas not only blows up the sides of its own transport container, but also hits the neighbouring containers and damages other goods. For example, around 40 boxes were damaged on a Hapag-Lloyd ship during the voyage from China. It took one and a half weeks to cut apart the wedged steel boxes in the port of Hamburg, resulting in enormous product damage.
The utilisation of loading capacity also has an impact on cargo safety. Container ships travelling from Asia to Europe, for example, tend to be more fully loaded than those travelling in the opposite direction. Due to their greater weight, they sink deeper into the water, which gives them stability. On the return journey, however, they are often only half loaded and therefore protrude further out of the water, increasing the potential areas of attack for waves and the containers in the cargo holds.
In addition, contrary to the ideal, many container ships are loaded unevenly in the harbour. The weight of the containers is therefore not evenly distributed over the available space, which means that the ship is not in the optimum position in the water and can lead to tilting, which in turn can cause product damage to sensitive goods such as windows and glass doors. However, the cause of most cargo damage is usually the improper stowage of the cargo and the climatic conditions inside the container.
Climatic stress on sea freight
Every year, significant amounts of moisture and humidity damage occur in the hatches and containers during sea transport due to climatic influences. In recent years, for example, raw food products such as coffee and cocoa or temperature-sensitive medicines have been severely damaged by pests and moisture and were unusable for sale. The costs incurred by companies have run into the millions.
Transport monitoring minimises product damage and secures rights of recourse
With the use of data loggers for transport monitoring, many risks and transport damage can be prevented during sea transport before they occur. For this purpose, the data loggers are installed on the cargo before it is loaded into the containers. The data recorders can be used to record data on a wide range of events during sea transport, such as stability, inclination, acceleration, direction of acceleration as well as temperature and humidity within defined limits. In addition, locations can also be recorded using integrated GPS functions and warning messages can be sent if limit values are drastically exceeded so that measures can be taken to recognise or prevent damage in good time.
Another advantage of data loggers: the recording of transport conditions can be used both to safeguard claims for recourse and to protect the company's own interests in defence against complaints. In addition, the data obtained can also be used to check processes when planning future transports and to optimise the transport chain. This will also play an important role in the future, as can be seen in the supply chain disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic. The shipping sector has learnt from past losses, but forward-looking risk management and the use of data loggers can reduce transport losses during maritime transport and save costs to a considerable extent in the future.
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