Provisions for the formation of a maritime shipping company’s competitiveness management system

Abstract

Purpose: The aim of this paper is to build up the competitiveness management system for a maritime shipping company. Freight market is a very specific market, which includes high competitiveness and has no differences between services delivered by competitors. As a result, shipping companies are unable to use price-based and quality-based competitive approach and should use unusual competitive behavior. Design/Methodology/Approach: To buid up the competitiveness management system it is necessary to describe its features and properties to get such system integrated into current company's business processes. Authors intended to describe the phased procedure for competitiveness management; the methodical approach for constructing such a system and features of the competitiveness management system. Findings: Every goal set by the authors, was reached and presented as a scheme and as a detailed text description of the scheme. This makes building up the competitiveness management system and its implementation much easier. Practical Implications: Results of the present research may be implemented into management practices in order to improve and increase the effectiveness of maritime shipping companies'competitiveness on the high competitive freight market. System can be tweaked to suit any shipping business - it is good and effective as for small one-vessel companies as well as for large corporations. Originality/Value: The main contribution of this study is the description of the methodical approach to build specific, shipping companies'oriented, competitiveness management system, which is partially similar to usual competitiveness management approach, although it has significant differences caused by the specifics of shipping.