| S.NO. | ITEMS | OTHER SERVICES | FASTFIX ADVANTAGES |
| 1 | SERVICE | | |
| a | Customer Service | Personal contacts with limited availability of communications. | 24hours 7 days a week 365days a year someone on the customer service team will be there to assist, direct, propose and react appropriately to guide customers in their global commodity and ship trading efforts |
| b | Enabling Better Decisions | Elaborate manual analysis of information from incoming emails | Quick answers in 30 seconds or less are available online for many complex ocean freight questions. It helps user to be always incharge of his decisions before committing cargo to a ship or vice-versa |
| c | Ease-of-Use | Send hundreds or thousands of emails that clog servers | "Insert-and-view" automation allows minimally trained personnel to perform sophisticated tasks with greater speed thus achieving a short learning curve. No need to send hundreds or thousands of email circulations for each cargo order or ship position update. |
| d | Customer Objectives | Unknown. Difficult to track and measure. | System solves atleast three main points for each of the core user groups. This creates commonality of purpose, transperancy and fact based discussion among all participants. |
| Charterers | Excessive dependence on local advisors or agents in few trading centers for charter arrangements which limits choice | i. know the best freight deal from reputable ship brokers and their ship owners via direct global bidding process |
| | | ii. Quick, easy and hassle free process of monitoring various offers at one location |
| | | iii. Full independent guidance from many of the analytical tools available on the system assist in decision making process. |
| Vessel Owners | Excessive dependence on local advisors or agents or narrow spectrum of known routine customers in select trading centers for charter arrangements which limits choice | i. Defined pre-fixture flow includes indicative quotes, main terms, COA/TC Pre-offers, firm offer |
| | | ii. Eliminate guess work by bidding only on most responsive and promising business. |
| | | iii. Significant cost savings on paper work, phones, faxes, personnel and other resource investments |
| Brokers | Heavy dependance on personal connections or email campaigns | i. Quick, discrete and efficient turnaround of fixture negotiations. |
| | | ii. Commissions secured due to well established transparent global process |
| | | iii. Best global matching system to conclude more fixtures in less time |
| 2 | QUALITY | | |
| a | Reduced Risk | Email systems may be susceptible to virus attacks and sometimes email circulars may go into spam folder of the intended recepient | System is safe, secure and provides high quality simple interface. Fail proof system which prevents data loss, ensures business continuity and minimizes the risk of operational disruptions. |
| Diverse Market Segments | Traditional methods allow users to participate in only one segment of the larger market opportunity | Ideal for small start-up companies as well as large well established global organizations as it enables all users to trade in different market segments and achieve better liquidity. |
| 3 | PRODUCTIVITY | | |
| a | Focus on Core Competencies | Decision makers time is diverted to many mundane tasks including sales and marketing, thus leaving less time for strategic business development issues. | Decision makers can focus on important business decisions and improve their core competencies that contribute to profitability both in short-term transactions and long-term strategic profitability. |
| b | Turn Variable Costs Into Fixed Costs | Several variable costs incurred in the process of acquiring leads, qualifying, initiating discussions and enabling them transaction ready. | Information witch hunt is a major variable cost in evaluating cargo trading proposals. This is simplified, organized and delivered at a fraction of cost. With ready access to global data in one location, cost of securing basic information for each transaction is minimized to very manageable monthly fee. |
| c | Outsourced Expertise | Traditional phone, fax, email and personal communications with a narrow group of people who may or may not be knowledgeable in offering viable answers. | Due to global nature of the system, high level trading, technical and operational expertise is available in the form of other user interaction. Keeping up with latest trends in technology or commodity and ship trading can be an expensive, time and resource consuming process. System enables direct interaction with other users who can offer cross section of ideas and perspective on executing a transaction in a specific port or country according to built-up knowledge base by suggesting best methods known to them. |
| 4 | OTHER | | |
| a | Reduced Costs | Many small firms experience a competitive disadvantage due to cost of acquiring, collating and maintaining relevant data on an ongoing basis and large firms divert expensive resources to tasks that address very narrow business scope. | The system has low maintenance and very competitive cost-per-transaction. No need for big IT staff, support resources or other personnel |
| b | Subscription Pricing | Generally very expensive annual dues for multiple data sources which offer data format that is not actionable and may not be seemless to transactional process | No heavy up- front capital investment and no financial barriers required to develop sophisticated software systems as it delivers all the necessary functionality on a pay-as-you-go basis. |
| c | Hosted Delivery | Not available for global delivery. Most systems are internal to own organizations that is restrictive in nature. | Ideal for companies that want to focus on core business/ trading activities and rid themselves of an elaborate system administration, IT management and enterprise business systems deployment. |
| d | Participation | Not available. | System facilitates companies that are routine users, regardless of their size, to participate in an interactive manner for further development of local markets |
| e | Streamlined Process | Only few organizations may have the setup. | Well defined and streamlined fixture process that offers transperancy to the entire pipeline of activities. Due to interactive nature, users can react only when there is sufficient responsiveness for that specific transaction. |
ational dry bulk cargo shipping business. The proprietary technology FastFix™ offers the complete transactional solution. We provide primary converging point for fixing (finding employment) the ships.Our technology integrates pertinent complex global data from various sources and translates into actionable set of solutions for various parties involved. The system attempts to eliminate banking related guesswork when chartering ships, provides commercial, technical data related to commodities, ports, ships, weather, political & currency risks and helps evaluate financial feasibility for concluding a specific transaction within few seconds thereby reducing weeks or months of work into few manageable steps. We serve cargo owners, ship owners, ship brokers, International traders and International bankers.