11,000 items make cargo move swiftly

How do you maintain and ensure that the vessels in a fleet are ship shape at all times?

DFDS operates a large fleet on 24 routes across Europe and Türkiye. Each and every vessel requires just the right equipment to sail safely and on schedule.

The DFDS equipment centre is a central function that helps us standardise and make a more universally usable fleet. This benefits our customers across industries - it helps us be flexible and ensures that we can reuse assets when and where they make sense. Many smaller ferry and logistics companies buy equipment for a specific corridor, and if they start operating another one, they need to buy specific equipment for that route, too. That can be both pricy and complicated.

Having a central equipment centre means that we can ship metal or any kind of cargo on any one of our ships on any route in our wide-ranging network – we can adjust our solutions quickly to suit the customer’s and situation’s requirements.

Central pool of equipment reduces costs across routes

When you share equipment with a pool of other vessels, total cost of ownership is divided, and the equipment is more actively utilised. Our global equipment pot consists of 11,000 pieces of cargo carrier and security equipment. We have thousands of roll trailers and cassettes that make handling and moving cargo a fast and easy affair.

We can do temporary modifications if necessary, and always offer flexible solutions for any industry or customer across our widespread routes.

Scalable solutions on every vessel, in every port

Being part of the overall Fleet Management structure, a dedicated Equipment Centre adds an additional mechanism for sharing best practices between our various Routes and Terminals – each with their own operational specialisms. This supports easier and quicker start-up of new cargo types into different routes. Having a team devoted to this equipment pool also ensures we are continuously challenging our processes and proactively working with our supplier base to improve design and suitability of our fleet.