HANSA 04-2018

Schiffstechnik | Ship Technology
»It wouldn’t make sense
to add another box to the ship
that requires constant attention«
Another vital element is the relationship
between ship and shore, which digitalisation
is transforming. Traditionally,
captains have been the ultimate arbiters
of all the information that flows on and
off the ship. So, there are often some cultural
hurdles that need to be overcome
when you’re using
technology that
takes a lot of this
out of their hands.
For instance, captains
might think
that they are being
monitored by a shorebased team that
won’t necessarily understand why certain
decisions were made. Providing a shared
data platform, accessible and populated
by the teams both afloat and ashore, will
build trust.
Coming from a seafaring heritage, we
can see that transparency needs to benefit
both sides. There are two parts to this
– technical and cultural. From the technical
side, we need to make sure that the
reporting environment does not add
work to the workload of those afloat. Instead
we work with legacy systems and
new connectivity services both old and
new, to reduce the time spent on reporting,
while increasing the usefulness of
the data. This could mean, for example,
looking at something like the noon report,
which has for centuries been the
main form that the »narrative« of a voyage
takes. It wouldn’t make sense to add
another box in the ship that requires constant
attention. Instead, if we can find
a way to, at the touch of a button, log
changes in activity, the rest of the data
is supplied by the automatic data collection
of speed, fuel use, etc. This then creates
a chronological picture of the voyage,
which is much more useful and addresses
legislative vessel performance requirements
such as MRV and SEEMP.
With these kinds of technological innovations
in place, on the cultural side,
we can work with our customers to make
sure that the increased level of transparency
they experience ends up as a net
positive for their business. If there’s increased
ship-to-shore transparency, there
needs to be a mutual understanding there
that this is going to be used to enhance
performance – not as a tool to catch the
captain out.
Behaviour is also crucial to maintaining
safety. While collecting more data
doesn’t risk the loss
of control over a
vessel, if data is intercepted
or hacked,
it would have serious
commercial
consequences. Cyber
security needs a joined-up approach
throughout the entire chain of communication.
It needs everyone, at every risk
point, to make sure that they have the appropriate
technology, and more importantly,
human behaviours in place, to
minimize the risk of a security breach.
This is a matter of everyone maintaining
procedures like regularly changing passwords
and not plugging in external devices
without proper precautions. While we
use sophisticated encryption at our end
to maintain data security, and ensure that
the proper policies are in place to prevent
a breach, human behaviour is the determining
factor in keeping data safe.
The most important
key to digital
»Adopting digitalisation
to optimize your business
is a lot like going on a diet«
success however,
is to listen first to
what the shipping
community needs
and adopt a pragmatic
approach to digitalisation – focusing
first on what makes the biggest impact
and »bang for your buck«. Moving in
this way makes it a lot easier to focus on
what’s going to bring the greatest advantages
to the business, collaborating, and
joining the dots that matter, rather than
trying to optimise everything at once.
This is the thinking that underpins
our voyage monitoring offering OTIS
(Online Tracking and Information System),
which provides weather, security
and navigational data. We service over
11.000 vessels, providing location data –
with many thousands of locations transmitted
every day. Allowing owners, operators
and shore crew to see where their
ship is, and what it’s doing minimizes
the risk from adverse situations such as
weather or piracy. This informs the next
phase in our development journey, which
is to use the data we already have (and
new datasets as they become available) –
and to use machine learning techniques
to build predictive models based on analytics
and data from past voyages.
The most important factor here is to
start with what makes the biggest impact
to the total voyage as a whole and go from
there. As we see it, this is weather, which
is the largest contributor to performance
often by orders of magnitude. By comparing
some actual voyages against recommended
routes, we see the scope of some
of the potential savings just from weather
routing. In one example, avoiding adverse
weather could have used one third of the
fuel when compared to the route taken,
and still arrived on time. Looking at efficiency
in this way, it’s clear why we need
to take weather as our starting point.
Adopting Big Data and digitalisation
to optimize your business is a lot like going
on a diet - it’s a journey to becoming
leaner, healthier and more resilient.
And just like a diet,
you need to focus
on the things that
are going to make a
real difference first
– cutting out the
burger and chips
rather than just switching from regular
to diet coke. And similarly, it needs
to take account of your lifestyle and routine
to avoid becoming a crash diet, or
something that is given up after a few
days. Technology needs to do the same
– by taking a pragmatic approach, looking
for the big ticket items and focusing
on the human element, we can use data
to help the shipping community become
healthier in the long term.
Author: Stuart Nicholls,
CEO, StratumFive
info@stratumfive com
HANSA International Maritime Journal – 155. Jahrgang – 2018 – Nr. 4 71