One of the questions members frequently ask the Club is about the difference between a forwarder's certificate of receipt (FCR) and an NVOC (non-vessel-operating carrier) bill of lading.
When you have finished reading this stand up at your desk. Now imagine that within ten seconds you are moved to a position two storeys above you and 11 metres along the floor. And then, with equal suddenness, you are back at your desk, only to be immediately transported back again up two floors and 11 metres along ... and so on and on, three times a minute, one hundred and eighty times an hour, for days at a time... Within a few minutes of this treatment you would be begging for this torture to stop. Yet this is not some white-knuckle fairground ride, but what cargo experiences day in, day out in containers on board ship.
Even on land, cargo can experience very substantial decelerations, particularly where containers are carried by rail. Although containers are now more often carried on dedicated point-to-point container trains, on long-distance movements marshalling cannot be eliminated altogether.
Our colleagues at the UK P&I Club have recently published edition No. 7 in their loss-prevention series "Carefully to Carry". It looks at the problems encountered in shipping containers - particularly the stresses caused to stacks in heavy seas - and contains much useful advice on lashing and securing systems.
At the end of last year, the English Commercial Court was asked to decide whether a forwarder could limit its liability in a case where the circumstances of the loss were unclear. Which party had the burden of proving what actually happened?
Postgraduate research by Steven Bell, as part of his MSc in logistics and supply chain management at the Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, UK, has highlighted several gaps between the services freight forwarders think their customers want, and what the customers are actually looking for.
