TITLE:
Utilization of DSS to the Promotion and Conclusion of Charters in the Shipping and Supply Chain Context
AUTHORS:
Foteini Kontogiorgou, Damianos P. Sakas, Nikolaos T. Giannakopoulos, Nikos Kanellos, Christos Christopoulos
KEYWORDS:
Supply Chain, Shipping Companies, Digital Marketing, Charters, Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCM), Decision Support Systems (DSS)
JOURNAL NAME:
Modern Economy,
Vol.14 No.9,
September
6,
2023
ABSTRACT: In recent times, the importance of shipping services has been rapidly
increasing. As a consequence, shipping companies seek to capitalize on every
available strategy and opportunity to promote their services and manage to
promote and conclude charters. This highlights the role of digital marketing and
the utilization of customer data originating from corporate websites. Moreover,
to this aim, shipping companies can utilize various Decision Support Systems
(DSSs) available, based on their corporate goals. This research focused on
gathering big data from the web pages of the 5 largest shipping companies in
the worldwide economic context, which were analyzed by utilizing various DSSs
to evaluate their effect on the performance of the shipping firms. The
collected data were elaborated through statistical analyses (correlation and
linear regression), and their coefficients were used as inputs for the deployed
Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping (FCM) DSS model. As a result, from the utilization of
the DSS with the website analytical data from the shipping companies, the
authors found that it is essential for these firms to reduce the bounce rate of
their website customers and visitors in order to enhance their ranking in
search engines. Thus, by ranking higher in their customers’ search engine
results, shipping companies would be able to promote and conclude more
charters. The role of DSSs in this goal of shipping companies is highlighted by
this study as a determinant.