Consolidated Data: The Template for Shipping's Digital Transformation

 

Don’t wait for regulation to drive data consolidation - the commercial opportunities are closer than you think, writes Staci Satterwhite, CEO ABS Wavesight.

Shipping is often encouraged to take lessons from other industries. Just as they have benefited from digital transformation, shipping has a unique opportunity to leverage the power of AI and predictive analytics to drive operational efficiency, enhance safety and increase commercial opportunity.

The process of digitalization has taken root in shipping, but it suffers from a familiar challenge of fragmentation and perceptions of low value. Until these stumbling blocks can be overcome, progress will remain slow.

For shipowners and operators, the primary driver to achieving digital transformation is to access complex and sometimes disparate information and ideas within a single pane of glass to drive efficiencies and improve operations.

The aim is to harness all the available data to create insights that bring value and help management run a better business, not just to deploy software because they feel they have to. Shipping is a value-creation business. The software it adopts must drive revenue growth and reduce expenses.Most often it is the consolidation of data that drives value creation. In fact, uniting data sources is key to enabling the shipping industry to embrace the next technology wave - machine learning, AI and predictive analytics.

The early stages of digital transformation are often marked by disruption, and there are plenty of examples of apparently simple changes from paper to digital that have faced resistance. Digitalizing medical records seems an obvious way to share data between users in different locations, but suspicion of change meant it wasn’t always welcomed at first. Once there was a robust use case, that resistance fell away.

Swap patient scans for data on vessel status, condition of equipment and expected weather, and superintendents and crew start to see what it can do for them in their day-to-day work. Add in the potential of AI, predictive data analytics and risk-based intelligence to provide real-time updates to personnel, and it’s possible to enhance safety and improve regulatory compliance.

The challenge is pushing the adoption curve past the point where the benefits can be felt more easily by any operator. Resistance to change still exists, and we need to recognize that some in shipping believe that collecting, storing and sharing data creates more transparency than they require.

So, will better vessel operations software be adopted more widely? The answer of course is yes, not least because the potential of machine learning and AI turns the tide into a tidal wave. Owners need to understand that a transparent approach is the way this industry is moving.

A data-driven strategy exposes the way you run your business toward your partners in a way that simply wasn’t possible even a decade ago.

That creates understandable resistance; too many internal stakeholders still view it as a necessary evil and haven’t made the leap toward recognizing the value it can bring. Compliance and reporting are obvious first steps but not enough of the industry is seeing vessel management software as a performance tool that can create genuine, lasting benefits.

To innately commercial beings like shipowners, thinking like an investor comes naturally. The challenge for software providers is to make their solutions more investable. Just like shipowners, software providers need to realize the imperative of creating value and bringing the elements together.

This includes the day-to-day business of shipping and ship management, but beyond the kind of condition monitoring that drives safety and maintenance routines, visibility can create value by providing vessel data that supports its charter earnings and value in the second-hand market.

The maritime industry is experiencing profound change, and just like other sectors, there will be winners and losers in terms of those operators who prefer resistance to progress. The progressive influx of AI into our daily working lives will only increase the transparency that marks out the companies that can adapt to the new data-driven reality.

But in a world where the data can make the difference between profit and loss, holding on to old ways of thinking may be a threat to the bottom line. Embracing the opportunity increases the odds not just of survival but of rising to the top.

Any market defined by multiple small players will go through a consolidation phase as value starts to become evident or external drivers like regulation start to exert pressure. That’s when it pays to have a mindset that identifies the value not just in corporate consolidation, but also in bringing together the right elements of data and decision-making.

It would be wrong to sit on our hands and think that regulation will eventually do this job for us. True, new safety and environmental regulations will bring more transparency. But how much better would it be to recognize that change is happening and get ahead of the wave before it breaks?

Staci Satterwhite is CEO of ABS Wavesight.