For most ship managers, husbandry port calls sit in an uncomfortable gap. They are operationally critical: the crew changes, repairs, bunkering stops and maintenance calls that keep vessels running - yet they are routinely managed through email chains, informal coordination and judgment calls made without reliable data. The costs are real; the visibility is not.
Launching today, Marcura Husbandry is built to close that gap, bringing planning, procurement, execution and benchmarking into a single connected workflow.
Of the roughly 1.3 million port calls recorded globally each year, close to a fifth are classed as husbandry, according to Marcura’s analysis. Despite the significant number of calls that exist specifically to maintain vessels, the process governing them has barely changed in decades.
Masters scope services informally. Agents are appointed based on familiarity rather than contract compliance. Preliminary invoices are approved without benchmark context, and when the final disbursement account arrives higher than expected, which it routinely does, the cause is rarely identified and almost never recovered.
Janani Yagnamurthy, SVP, Product, Marcura, said: "Marcura has spent 25 years at the centre of port spend management, processing disbursement accounts and building the data that underpins how the industry understands port costs. That depth of proprietary data, combined with the expertise we have built internally, gives us unmatched insight that helps drive value. Marcura Husbandry brings this capability into the full vessel management lifecycle, and we believe it marks a fundamental shift in how ship managers approach non-commercial port call costs."
Marcura Husbandry brings cost intelligence into the workflow before any agent is appointed. The Estimator module draws on historical data, port profiles and vessel characteristics to set an expected husbandry cost, so teams can compare ports and budgets before procurement starts. Where contracted rates exist, they surface automatically at approval. Where they do not, a structured digital RFQ brings every agent quote into a standardised format and shows an accurate market benchmark alongside each one.
Once an agent is appointed, the PDA is screened against benchmark rates, contracted rates and historical spend before approval. The FDA gets the same check when it arrives. Every call feeds vessel and voyage spend analytics, PDA-to-FDA variance reporting and updated market benchmarks, giving teams the evidence to negotiate, renew contracts and report with confidence.
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