How Pangaea Turns Manual Cleaning Work Into Better Operational Decisions

Pangaea set out to improve their process for keeping vessels cleaned and supplied without asking operators to work differently. The approach was to automate the manual work that sits between an operator and a good decision, and to put the right information in the hands of the operators at the right time and the right place.

Like most operators, Pangaea already had a process for hold cleaning supplies. Masters were sending hold cleaning ROB reports when requested, minimum stock levels weredefined by the technical team, and operators knew where it usually made sense to restock. The difficulty was that this information lived across Excel files, PDFs, inboxes, and individual experience – it didnot have a shared home. Decisions were often made late in the voyage, and ideal opportunities to supply earlier could be missed.

With CleanQuote, that information now sits in one place and is ready when the operator needs it. Now, Pangaea’s operators are actively prompted when they should begin to think of resupplying the vessel. Beyond day-to-day purchasing, Pangaea uses the reporting and insights to see where they buy and to shift purchases toward better-positioned ports, a small change per voyage that supports more efficient voyages and lower cost across the fleet. That visibility has been one of the highlights for the team. Seeing purchasing and inventory patterns across the whole fleet in one view is something they did not have before.
“You are dealing with a constant flow of things that cannot wait,” says a senior operator at Pangaea. “Inventory matters, but it is easy for it to slip behind whatever is more urgent that hour. Having it prompt me on its own, with all the information I actually need, helps me make the best decision.”

 

 

Automating the routine, alerting when it’s time for action
The shift was to treat inventory and hold photo tracking as a continuous input to your decision making rather than an on-demand report you request at the time you look to supply or clean.

Inventory data is captured across vessels and over time based on the vessel’s activity, and an AI agent reviews every submission to flag shortages against minimum stock levels, highlight changes from the previous report, catch missing or inconsistent input, and recommend when and where to restock based on upcoming ports and historical pricing.

The same logic is applied to the other parts of hold cleaning. When an operator needs to supply, requests go out and come back structured and comparable in CleanQuote’s Quote Matrix, so the choice rests on price, lead time, and time required. Hold photos arrive from the master automatically, the same way the inventory does. The result is better timing: purchases move earlier in the voyage and toward ports where supply is reliable and prices are typically lower, while the risk of arriving somewhere remote without the right equipment goes down.

For Pangaea, automating this collection and review workflow has been one of the clearest wins. Work that used to mean chasing masters and reading through submissions by hand now happens on its own, and the operations team has been enthusiastic about how much attention that frees up for the decisions that actually matter.

 

 

Where the work already happens
For a global company like Pangaea with operations in multiple countries, establishing a shared way of working is especially important to maintain a consistent quality of operations. To accomplish that, any new system must integrate with and talk to the other systems to truly be useful. Much of why CleanQuote took hold is that the information meets operators inside the tools they already use.

Pangaea’s teams work in Sedna, and CleanQuote runs as a native app inside it. Opening a job surfaces the vessel’s latest ROB, hold photos, hull condition, and open requests in the same place operators are already reading and replying to mail, with no separate system and no extra login.
Similarly, notifications to submit updated inventory and hold photos are sent automatically to masters based on port call activity received via an integration with Pangaea’s voyage management system.

 

 

Adoption was the easy part
Operations software usually stalls on adoption, and ease of use is the point Pangaea has been most positive about. The platform spread quickly across the team without formal training, because it removed work rather than adding it, and operators took to it right away. That momentum has continued as more of the day-to-day runs through the platform, and Pangaea now runs all of their hold cleaning supply orders through CleanQuote.

That smooth adoption is the whole point. A tool only improves decisions if operators actually use it, and it only gets used if it fits the day they already have. For a fleet of any real size, the hard part is no longer collecting information but making consistent, well-timed decisions across many vessels at once.

Pangaea’s experience shows what that looks like in practice: automate the routine, put the result

where operators already work, and better decisions follow without adding to the team.

About CleanQuote
CleanQuote is a maritime technology company helping dry bulk operators and shipowners make better cleaning and procurement decisions through structured workflows, market data, and a global network of trusted vendors for hold and hull cleaning.

 

About Pangaea Logistics Solutions
Pangaea Logistics Solutions is a global dry bulk shipping and logistics company operating a fleet of owned and chartered vessels, including ice-class tonnage. It serves industrial customers with cargo movement across conventional and specialised trade routes, and is listed on Nasdaq under PANL.