What is Ship Agency?

In the business world, the term “agency” is not a new thing. This sector is quite special because it is considered a bridge for business actors to meet their needs.

Through the page of Market Business News, agencies can be said to be firms or organizations that provide certain services, for example, digital marketing or creative content. Then, what is the role of agents in transportation and logistics, especially shipping?

Definition of Ship Agency

Based on Indonesia’s law concerning Shipping, a ship agency is a national sea transportation company or a national business company specifically established to carry out a ship agency appointed by a foreign sea transport company to manage the interests of the ship while in Indonesia.

In line with that, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) defines a ship agency as any person (both personal and legal entity) involved on behalf of the ship owner, charterer or operator, and cargo owner.

So, the ship agency is defined as the representative of the ship company who is responsible for preparing all the needs from before docking to after docking. This is important because every ship that wants to come to unload requires a representative at the port.

In other words, this service is an extension of the ship owner.

Types of Ship Agencies

In general, ship agency in Indonesia consists of two types, general agency for foreign ships and agency for national ships.

The difference between the two lies in the scale of the company. The general agent is international in nature, so it includes ship companies from abroad, meanwhile the national ship agency only takes care of ships from every region in Indonesia.

Both of them can appoint sub agents from local agents to become service representatives when the ship owner wants to dock at a special port.

In Indonesia, ship agency is associated with Indonesia Ship Agent Association This association functioned as an institution that gives training and coaching to Ship Agencies

Why Do You Need a Ship Agency?

Since the complication of administration is quite a huge task for the ship owner, a ship agency will help those administration process. Because technically, there are at least three stages a ship must go through to be able to unload cargo at the port, namely:

Pre-arrival
Every port has their own regulation that has to be followed by the ship owner before they dock. Usually, a ship will be ordered to stay and wait in the open sea until further notice about arrival schedule. This is where ship agency steps in, they will prepare all required document.

On-arrival
In this stage, ship agency will make sure everything that the ship needs including administrations, permits and other needs is fulfilled as to not causing any problem at the later stage. Since ship owners might miss one or a few regulations in the local port. Added to that, with local consideration and complexities, ship owner will need some help from local people, in this case the ship agency.

Departure
If the loading and unloading process is complete, the ship owner cannot just leave. Local authority will double check everything regarding to the ship and the crew. This is also the job of ship agency, the last thing they need to make sure is that nothing wrong happened before departure.

This also ensure the ship can sail to their next destinations with no problems. If any problem occured, the cost might be that the ship will be unable to sail.

You can imagine if those three things are done by the crew, not to mention sailing to foreign place without local people, it’s going to be very difficult and time consuming. That will eventually affect the ship’s next activity. So we can say that ship agency’s part in a ship’s journey is not a thing to be taken lightly.

Therefore, Tarunacipta Kencana is here to answer market needs related to shipping services. With this, ship owners or companies do not have to bother taking care of administrative processes and the crew’s work is more efficient.

Tarunacipta Kencana is a Reliable Shipping Agent Company. Established in 1994.