App helps find best fuel prices

Inatech has seen increased take-up of its ‘Smart Trader’ app, which enables companies to map entire fleets of ships and plan for best port to bunker to achieve the lowest prices for fuel. SAL Heavy Lift will apply Smart Trader across its parent group Harren & Partner’s fleet of ships.

“Smart Trader and Shiptech are now a crucial part of our operational infrastructure, ensuring that we are fully compliant and have complete visibility on all aspects of our fleets and bunker buying,” explained Danny Stutzbecher, head of bunkers at SAL Heavy Lift in Hamburg. “This has been an important part of our preparation for 2020.”

Anticipating a spike in fuel price volatility and supply disruption thanks to new IMO rules, Inatech has designed Smart Trader to enable companies to track their vessels on an integrated system that displays fuel levels on board, news alerts and live pricing data from S&P Global Platts. The tool syncs with Inatech’s Shiptech platform, which enables emission control area compliance and can calculate a fuel’s energy content, or calorific value, an increasingly vital metric since the arrival of new low-sulphur fuels.

Smart Trader data covers refined wholesale and retail marine fuels at more than 350 ports worldwide, along with regional indices, spreads and moving averages. Potential suppliers are checked for quality and credit references to control counterparty risk.