Cargo crosses an ocean in a fortnight and then waits nine days in Male because nobody asked which day the boat goes.
We watch this happen every month. A consignment is planned carefully from the supplier's door to the port of Male, clears in three days, and then sits in a shed for nine because the boat to the island went on Monday and nobody had checked.
Plan the last leg first. Every island has a sailing pattern and for most of them it is one or two boats a week. Find out which day yours is, and then work backwards from it. Cargo has to be at the harbour the afternoon before sailing. That means it leaves our shed that morning. That means clearance has to be finished the working day before, which means the declaration goes in two days earlier, which means the papers have to be complete before the vessel berths. Miss any link in that chain and you are not waiting a day, you are waiting for the next sailing.
Order the whole load at once, even when you will not use all of it at once. Three small orders are three manifests, three loading fees and three chances for one late item to hold the rest. On island construction jobs we plan one load a week carrying what that week needs, and it is the single change that makes a small island site possible: there is nowhere to store a fortnight of materials, and cargo stacked in the open is cargo in the rain.
Tell us what is heavy and what is fragile before we build the load, not after. Loading is not gentle, the deck is shared, and a crate of tiles under a drum of diesel is a claim rather than a delivery. We crate and mark by default now because asking every time slowed everything down, but we still cannot guess which of your forty boxes contains the glass.
Name somebody at the other end. Cargo handed to a quay is cargo nobody is responsible for. Cargo handed to a person who signs for it is a delivery. It sounds like a formality until the week a load is short and the only question anybody can answer is who unloaded it.
And allow for the weather. Between May and November the schedule is a plan rather than a promise, and a rough two days moves everything behind it. Build a week of slack into anything with a date on it, and if you cannot, tell us at the start so we can send it earlier rather than faster.
