Greece

What are the benefits of loading your cargo to Greece via Sterac? What are the flow of goods in this region? And what should be considered when selecting a Greek freight forwarder?

Greece possesses one of the largest commercial fleets in the world along with significant infrastructure for the supply and provisioning of ships. A customer of STERAC required an urgent shipment at short notice with 6 loading metres to be shipped to GR-Piraeus. This was to be sent to the container feeder ship MV “Asiatic Jade” and was urgently required for installation. Ships cannot wait for individual shipments to arrive as the docking and follow-up costs of a waiting ship are immense. This represented the challenging conditions under which the entire organisation of transport was to take place. How can it be ensured that, on the one hand, loading is both fast and secure for the customer, while also ensuring that no expensive warehousing costs are incurred on site? Shipping agents act as an interface between potential deliveries and incoming ships. As a rule of thumb it is they who take on responsibility for the final section of the “On board” delivery, which was also the case here. Warehousing goods with shipping agents is expensive and, in the majority of cases, not in the interest of the sender. It is possible to play it safe and ensure that the goods are available when the ship enters into port, this however means incurring significant costs for storage with the shipping agent. Ideally the goods arrive just-in-time with the agent at the destination port, and are warehoused for just a short period of time until the ship enters port. As the ships can sometimes deviate from the original travel plan, the planning efforts for the logistics provider can be demanding. Even direct deliveries to the ship can be made by STERAC, but remain more of an exception in practice. 

During this specific loading procedure what was important for the customer? Where were we able to play to our strengths? A first important point to mention here is our comparably high departure frequency to Greece. With 5 truck departures per week from Germany's northern region in the majority of cases, STERAC is one of the top performers in supplying the comparatively small national economy of Greece. This naturally presents us with more and varied combination possibilities than would be the case if loading were done 1 - 2 times per week. Our customer was able to benefit significantly from our flexibility and make a booking with us in time, even if this was “just” 1.5 weeks before the ship was to dock in Piraeus. Our excellent connections with the authorities, our partners and local contact partners also proved to be beneficial. Inexperienced freight forwarders who are new to the freight forwarding and logistics market in Greece have had to endure many bad experiences including situations where vehicles were left stranded for long periods before being unloaded. Thanks to our outstanding local network we can all but prevent this situation from happening. The result: The loading of ship replacement parts was completed on time 1 day before the ship docked with the agent.