Performance Indicators Considered for Selection of Agency in Maritime Industry

Abstract:A shipping agency or shipping agent is the designated person or agency held responsible for handling shipments and cargo, and the general interests of its customers, at ports and harbors worldwide, on behalf of ship owners, managers, and charterers. Shipping agents will usually take care of all the regular routine tasks of a shipping company quickly and efficiently. They ensure that essential supplies, crew transfers, customs documentation, and waste declarations are all arranged with the port authorities without delay and often provide the shipping company with updates and reports on activities at the destination port so that shipping companies have real-time information while goods are in transit. Due to these reasons, selection of the ship agencies becomes an indispensable part of maritime transportation. Managing a ship agency requires interconnected and labor-intensive processes for any kind of shipping operations, which results in a complicated mission. This study presents the most important ship agency selection criteria, according to the determined criteria in the literature, by employing fuzzy AHP technique, one of the most common fuzzy multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods.