Marcura Launches Platform to Digitize Ship Husbandry Services

ATHENS, Jakartaweekly.com—Marcura launched Marcura Husbandry today, Wednesday, May 27, 2026. The digital platform is designed to help ship management companies control port operational costs, which have long been considered lacking in transparency and still heavily reliant on manual processes.

Marcura SVP Product Janani Yagnamurthy said the platform was developed to integrate planning, procurement, execution, and benchmarking of vessel husbandry service costs into a single digital workflow.

In the shipping industry, she explained, husbandry services cover various operational needs when vessels call at ports, including crew changes, bunkering, repairs, and vessel maintenance.

According to her, Marcura has spent the past 25 years managing port expenditure data and vessel cost reports that have become the foundation of the industry’s understanding of port operational expenses.

“Marcura Husbandry brings this capability into the full vessel management lifecycle, and we believe this marks a fundamental shift in how ship managers handle non-commercial port call costs,” Janani said in a press release on Wednesday, May 27, 2026.

She revealed that Marcura’s analysis found that of the approximately 1.3 million port calls recorded globally each year, nearly one-fifth fall into the husbandry category.

Despite playing a crucial role in maintaining vessel operations, the management process has reportedly seen little change over the past several decades.

The company also believes that husbandry cost management practices are still largely handled informally, ranging from appointing agents based on familiarity to approving invoices without clear data benchmarks.

With the digital platform, all these processes will be integrated from start to finish. Through its Estimator module, the platform utilizes historical data, port profiles, and vessel characteristics to estimate husbandry costs before agents are appointed.

The system also enables companies to compare cost estimates across ports and align them with operational budgets.

In addition, Marcura Husbandry introduces a digital RFQ system to standardize price quotations from port agents and automatically display market benchmarks.

The company also stated that the platform is capable of reviewing Preliminary Disbursement Accounts (PDA) and Final Disbursement Accounts (FDA) based on spending history, contract rates, and market benchmarks before the approval process takes place.

Data from each port call will then be processed into vessel and voyage cost analytics to help companies negotiate contracts, evaluate expenditures, and improve operational efficiency.