Shipping has spent years tightening voyage costs, bunker procurement and commercial port expenses, but one sizeable part of the bill remains comparatively untouched: husbandry.
For Antonis Malaxianakis, founder and CEO of Athens-based port cost management platform HarborLab, that blind spot is particularly evident around bunkering, crew changes and stores, where technical departments can still be managing substantial sums through spreadsheets and email.
“Husbandry calls have never carried the same profit and loss visibility as commercial port calls,” Malaxianakis tells Maritime CEO.
The absence of cargo revenue against which expenditure can be measured has meant these calls have escaped some of the scrutiny applied elsewhere in ship operations.
At the same time, the invoices are anything but simple. A port call can generate hundreds of pages involving port authorities, pilots, tug operators, customs brokers, bunker suppliers, repair companies and other parties. Pricing may vary even within the same port, while additional items such as demurrage, detention, congestion surcharges and equipment rental can emerge later.
For Malaxianakis, who worked in disbursement departments at Thenamaris and Product Shipping & Trading before founding HarborLab in 2020, the problem is less about a lack of attention from technical managers than the tools available to them.
The gap is particularly pronounced in Asia. “One data point from our analysis makes the structural difference concrete: 75% of technical managers in APAC still manage husbandry bills in Excel today, compared with 40% in EMEA,” he says.
Across much of Asia, technical managers have direct control over dayto-day port expenditure but often lack a live reference against which an agent’s quote can be checked.
HarborLab sees that combination as one reason APAC has become a priority market.
“That combination, direct spending authority paired with heavier reliance on manual tools, does leave APAC more exposed to inconsistent pricing,” Malaxianakis explains.“The decision-maker already controls the budget; they’re simply working without the visibility to know whether what’s being paid is fair.”
HarborLab argues that the difference between checking whether an invoice matches a quoted tariff and determining whether the quoted price was reasonable in the first place is where much of the potential saving sits.
The company points to a controlled three-month trial with one customer in which half of a fleet remained on its existing disbursement account process while the other half moved to HarborLab.
The HarborLab-managed vessels generated $220,000 in savings compared with $70,000 on the other half.
“The gap isn’t down to one single lever, but the largest multiplier is benchmarking,” Malaxianakis says.
“Manual review, however careful, can only check an invoice against a tariff document or a prior year’s DA; it can confirm a charge matches what was quoted, not whether the quote itself was fair.”
HarborLab checks individual expense items against its database covering more than 1,400 ports. The system also picks up incorrect and duplicated charges, with the company then taking discrepancies back to agents in an effort to turn the finding into a credit.
Benchmarking port calls is not as straightforward as comparing a bunker price or a standard commodity rate, however. Local tariffs, vessel types and individual port requirements mean two apparently similar services can legitimately carry very different costs.
Malaxianakis argues that broad averages would therefore create another problem rather than solve the existing one.
“Every benchmark is built at the level of port, vessel type, and expense category, not as one blended number, so a crane charge on an MR tanker at Tarragona is a different data point from the same charge on a bulker at Rotterdam,” he says.
Behind that sits a database built from more than 40,000 port calls across over 1,400 ports. HarborLab says its analysts also obtain and verify official tariffs directly with ports rather than relying solely on historical invoices.
Comparisons are then made against previously approved disbursement accounts for comparable ports and vessel types, while tariffs carry confidence indicators showing technical managers whether the underlying figure has been independently verified.
“Local variation is built into the comparison rather than smoothed over,” Malaxianakis says.
For a sector increasingly comfortable using data to scrutinise fuel consumption, vessel performance and voyage economics, his argument is that the same level of attention has yet to reach every invoice arriving from shore.
And in husbandry, there is still plenty sitting in the spreadsheet.