Zeeland Refinery Goes Live on CargoDocs for Barges

Zeeland Refinery has launched CargoDocs for Barges, a system developed by Electronic Shipping Solutions (ESS) allowing for the electronic nomination of barges between counterparties and issuance of electronic sailing advices and barge documents by terminals in the Amsterdam-Rotterdam-Antwerp (ARA) market.  

Zeeland Refinery created a customized interface which allows nominations to be received directly within the company’s mass balance system.  This is the first multi-party, electronic interface at a refinery or terminal in the ARA market and the first time that loading details have been distributed automatically from a loading terminal to all participants in the trade chain.   

Zeeland Refinery’s Ann Veraverbeke, Manager Valorization, says “The move to eNominations via the CargoDocs process brings Zeeland Refinery a step forward in electronic handling of their logistic processes.  After completing a comprehensive test phase, the nominations for export by barges will from now on be processed via the ESS platform interfacing with the refinery’s logistic system.  The different teams of LITASCO Group (LUKOIL International trading arm), Zeeland Refinery and ESS have been working closely together to make this successful.  At Zeeland Refinery, we are looking forward to benefiting from the efficiency gains in the electronic nomination and documentation process and thank the project team for their efforts.”  

LITASCO successfully used CargoDocs for electronic barge nominations unilaterally for over 18 months before Zeeland Refinery developed the interface to accept nominations to their refinery IT system.   

William Harwood, Head of Operations, LITASCO SA, says “LITASCO is pushing forward electronic solutions in the ARA barge market to modernize the way we do business. Electronic nominations transfer information as data packages, cutting out double input and summary spreadsheets. That enables the Company to have live information about a nomination once it has been sent, accepted, rejected or amended.  Most importantly for prompt invoicing and cash flow it gives immediate notification of barge loadings, not only for the first receiver, but right down the trade chain.” 

Having previously established the industry-accepted, global solution for electronic Bills of Lading in the tanker market, ESS entered the ARA barge market in 2011 at the urging of key industry players.  Traders, fed up with delays in communication, numerous nomination errors, and general duplication of work effort, turned to ESS to streamline the process.  CargoDocs for Barges brings standardization, straight through processing and transparency of information to the market as a whole and turns a tedious and time consuming manual process into the ease of clicking a button.  By dematerializing nomination and cargo information, CargoDocs allows data to flow seamlessly between multiple systems such as scheduling, trading, operations and demurrage. 

Cynthia Worley, Head of Energy at ESS comments, “We are delighted with the launch of CargoDocs at Zeeland and the continued support of LITASCO.  The growth of CargoDocs for Barges in the past year has been astounding, and is set to continue with a lineup of additional traders and terminals in the process of adopting the solution. It is increasingly clear that the needs of the energy sector are well matched by the solutions provided by ESS.  We will continue to work hard to understand the operational frustrations experienced by the industry in order to build and improve on our solutions.