“What our customer was looking for – apart from price, of course – was a shipping concept which would short transit times”, Andreas Wippern, Office Manager at Karl Gross in Düsseldorf, says. “That is why we decided to arrange for shipping of all parts of the consignment on a container vessel in liner service – including the shipment’s break bulk pieces. Not quite a ‘standard solution’ for shipping project cargo, but a transport method we have been successfully implementing for years when realizing logistics solutions for urgent project cargo shipments.”
We have successfully been implementing non-standardized project cargo shipping solutions for many years.
"Shorter and – quite important – more reliable transit times are significant advantages of container vessels in liner services compared to multipurpose vessels. Of course, when shipping industrial plants, machinery and equipment on container vessels, special preparations and planning are needed, but this effort may well pay off for such projects.” The port of loading selected for this shipment offers solid settings for such an undertaking – in regards to departure frequencies of container ships in liner service, and regarding the know-how available of how to handle such a ‘special container vessel shipment’.
“The colleagues from our Shanghai project cargo team functioned as ‘our eyes on-site’. And even though our transport order was ex FOB, our Chinese specialist team supported the local transport-preparations including direct contact to the Chinese supplier. They also took care of the shipment’s documentation”, Andreas Wippern reports.
The shipping concept which had been worked out by the project specialists from Karl Gross Rotterdam involved shipping the cargo on a container vessel in liner service from China to a North European base port first and then arrange for transshipment to a chartered coastal motor vessel for transportation to the final place of destination: a plant’s own port in Northern Scandinavia.
“Standardized solutions for transshipment were no option for getting the cargo to its final destination efficiently”, Andreas Wippern says. “The charter of the coastal motor vessel had several advantages: we could avoid having additional moves of the goods within transit port's area, i.e., which would have meant additional costs – and that we wanted to avoid in interest of our customer.”
