Unchartered Waters - Sea Freight Project Financial Planning for the Maritime Industry
- Claude Machiha
- Nov 23, 2022
- 2 min read
With an ever-expanding global offshore energy sector, marine project management has become the mainstay of various multinational sea and road freight corporations. Numerous Financial Planning opportunities exist in maritime insurance, cashflow management, and work breakdown structure organization, that add immeasurable value to the business a maritime firm does.
In its latest insight report, Offshore Energies UK (OEUK), the leading body representing the UK offshore energy industry, forecasts that more than two thousand oil and gas wells in the North Sea will be decommissioned by 2025 at an estimated cost of $23.7 billion.
This development indicates a potential increase in imports of oil and gas, which greatly concerns the sea freight business. The demand for Maritime Project Manager (PM) roles has increased as a result, because of the need for specialized expertise on scope development, schedules, resource planning, budgets, risk management strategies, and communication methods.
MARINE PROJECT MANAGEMENT
A Marine PM handles projects within the underwater marine environment (ROV/AUV/Sonar technologies). They create a work breakdown structure and use a hierarchical structure to plan the work that ships need to do. MMA Offshore for example, provide both front-end and back-end support with route planning and receipt of goods.
Marine PMs take on minor financial planning roles in their insurance planning and coordination of payment claims, and furthermore sit down with their clients to hash out somewhat of a 6-step financial plan. Such a plan covers mostly for the income protection against damaged goods (at sea and at bay), lost or stolen goods, and shipping delays.
SHIPBUILDING & REPAIR
Maintenance of shipping vessels requires extensive budget planning and healthy leveraged debt income, as the demand for shipping changes drastically, with peak retail cycles never truly being predictable.
Most maritime service providers such as MMA Offshore use data management to anticipate the seasonality of demand, in order to plan well for the shipping vessels to remain well-maintained and able to last long months without respite.
ONSHORE ADMINISTRATIVE PLANNING
The bulk of communication and coordination efforts occur onshore, pre-, during and post- the shipping vessel's expedition. A major element of marine project management are the ongoing engineering and technical projects that make the shipping happen.
Activities such as liaising with engineering advisors, providing construction supervision, undertaking vessel inspections and maintaining dry docking oversight all need a comprehensive budget plan, with ongoing cash flow management.
References:
Decommissioning North Sea oil, gas installations to cost $24 billion — industry group (worldoil.com)
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