TL;DR: A logistics software vendor is proposing standard contract language to assign clear responsibility for detention and demurrage across 20 common scenarios. For shippers and importers, this matters less as a news item and more as a mirror — reflecting just how exposed your current contracts likely are.
Every logistics team has been there: a demurrage invoice arrives, your team disputes it, and weeks of back-and-forth follow — emails, evidence gathering, carrier claims portals, freight auditors. The container was held up. Someone is responsible. But who?
The fact that this question is still unresolved — not in one shipment, but across the entire industry — is the actual story. Marseille-based logistics software vendor BuyCo recently presented a proposal at DCSA+'s Singapore event to standardize contract language around detention and demurrage responsibility, mapping 20 common scenarios to clear party accountability: shipper, carrier, or consignee. The concept is straightforward. The implications for your current operations are not.
BuyCo's framework draws from over 50 real-world root causes of D&D disputes, distilled from its own customer base — which includes Goodyear, Hershey, Renault, and Total Energies. The 20 scenarios it proposes to standardize break down as follows:
The goal: embed these agreed rules directly into ocean freight contracts so that when a dispute arises, the liability is predetermined — not negotiated after the fact.
Whether or not BuyCo's proposal gains industry-wide adoption (and adoption will be slow — more on that below), the framework surfaces a more immediate question: what do your current contracts actually say about D&D responsibility?
For most importers and exporters, the honest answer is: not enough.
Post-pandemic, D&D costs have remained structurally elevated compared to pre-2020 levels. Yet the majority of ocean freight service contracts still treat detention and demurrage as a grey zone— governed loosely by tariff schedules, carrier-standard terms, and customs that vary by port, region, and trade lane. Disputes are handled reactively, through freight audit firms and invoice-by-invoice negotiation, rather than resolved by clear contract language agreed upfront.
The cost of this ambiguity is not just the disputed invoices. Itis the operational overhead: the hours your team spends chasing refunds, the strained carrier relationships, the management bandwidth consumed by disputes that should have been non-events.
Here is what most shippers under estimate about D&D exposure: the scenarios most likely to hurt you are not the ones where the fault is obvious.
Transshipment delays caused by the carrier rolling a container? Clearer liability. But what about a scenario where your warehouse at destination cannot receive the container on arrival — is that a consignee failure, or did the carrier deliver ahead of a window you thought was agreed? What about a documentation issue created by your forwarder, not your own team?
Most current contracts are silent on these edge cases. And in the absence of explicit contract language, carriers have consistently held the billing advantage — because they issue the invoice, and contesting it is your burden.
The BuyCo framework explicitly assigns consignee liability for destination warehouse constraints that preclude timely pickup. If that is a scenario your operations face regularly — and for importers managing high-volume SKUs into distribution centres, it frequently is — your current contract language may be leaving you with no defensible position when those fees land.
One of the more candid observations at the Singapore meeting came from Olivier Martinot, global transports and customs leader for Adeo, a major European home improvement retailer and BuyCo customer. Martinot acknowledged that achieving a global agreement will be genuinely difficult — that even within French-based shipper networks, mobilizing enough volume to compel carrier adoption would require significant coalition-building.
He is right. Different regions carry different regulatory frameworks and commercial cultures. A contract standard that works cleanly in a Northern Europe trade context will not automatically translate to Southeast Asia or LATAM lanes. Global harmonization —if it happens at all — is years away.
But this is precisely why the proposal is useful right now, not as an industry mandate, but as a template. Smart procurement and logistics teams should be reading BuyCo's 20-scenario framework and asking: which of these are currently unresolved in our existing carrier contracts? Where are we most exposed? What language should we be negotiating into our next contract renewal?
1. Audit your current D&D contract language. Pull your top ocean freight service agreements and review exactly what they say — not what you assume they say — about detention and demurrage responsibility. Identify the grey zones.
2. Map your most common dispute scenarios. If your team is managing D&D claims reactively, categorize the top five to ten root causes you encounter. This is your internal risk register. Prioritize the ones that recur most frequently and carry the highest cost.
3. Use the BuyCo framework as a negotiation reference. You do not need industry consensus to begin incorporating clearer D&D language into your carrier contracts. The 20-scenario structure is a practical starting point for what to ask for — and what to pushback on — in your next renewal conversation.
4. Reduce the accrual, not just the invoice. As BuyCo CEO Carl Lauron noted: the real pain is not the invoicing, itis the D&D being generated in the first place. Process reviews —around documentation compliance, vessel cutoff management, and destination pickup coordination — will reduce the exposure before it becomes a billing dispute.
BuyCo's proposal will not fix the D&D problem overnight. But the fact that it was well-received at a DCSA event attended by the world's major liner carriers is itself significant. It signals that even within shipping lines — traditionally the entities with the least incentive to relinquish billing flexibility — there is growing appetite for a more structured, less adversarial approach to D&D accountability.
For shippers, the lesson is this: the industry may eventually standardize on a framework. But the window to negotiate better contract terms is always open — and waiting for consensus is a passive strategy in a cost environment that continues to penalize ambiguity.
Your contracts are not waiting for the industry to catch up. Your invoices are not either.
Source: Eric Johnson, Journal of Commerce,May 18, 2026 —https://www.joc.com/article/software-vendor-offers-proposal-to-establish-detention-demurrage-accountability-6222721
