In International Shipping News 06/05/2015
The maritime shipping industry, traditionally cautious to embrace new technology, is starting to use cloud computing services to make operations, communications and collaboration easier for a workforce spread around the globe.
The software-as-a-service market, where workers can access operations software on any computer with a Web browser, is expected to reach $106 billion in 2016, up from $87 billion this year, according to Forrester Research Inc. There isn’t any data available about cloud adoption in maritime shipping specifically, but industry experts say it’s lagged behind other businesses.
“Traditionally, the shipping industry has been slow to take up new technologies,” said Travis Monson, managing director of Monson Agencies Australia Pty. Ltd., a shipping agency based in Fremantle, Western Australia, that specializes in bulk commodities such as coal, iron ore, salt and grains. Mr. Monson, in an email, said that he sees more ship owners and ship charterers that are now willing to use cloud-based systems.
In April, for example, United Arab Shipping Co. said it automated its processes for purchasing fuel with a cloud-based fuel management system from Inatech. Previously, the company used a manual process for purchasing fuel, the company’s single biggest cost item. The system lets the shipping firm capture market prices from a variety of sources, including Platts and Saudi Aramco. It also lets UASC plan fueling for the entire fleet, track vessel performance and improve negotiations with suppliers.
Headquartered in Dubai, UASC owns and operates a fleet of 58 ships, with another 17 on order. The company has said that expansion is driving the need for better decisions around fuel, called bunker fuel in the shipping industry. Inatech has estimated that shipping companies may reduce a fleet’s bunker fuel costs by 3 to 5% by adding real-time access to pricing data, ship location and route information.
Cloud services also can make it easier to collaborate across the company and with outside companies on projects such as building new ships.
Today, many firms rely on manpower and spreadsheets to make that happen. “When you’re an owner and you go to a shipyard and you say here’s a plan for building my vessel, there’s a two-year period where the vessel is being constructed where both sides send people to the shipyard with spreadsheets to find out what’s not going right and to do a negotiation over getting those things fixed,” said David Rivas, president and COO of Stage 3 Systems Inc., a software and cloud services provider for the shipping industry.
Stage 3 Systems built a cloud-based project quality management system called Aquila that a division of Seaspan Corp., a Hong Kong-based cargo ship chartering company, uses to watch over the construction of container ships. Now, the thousands of comments and replies between Seaspan executives and the shipyards are organized into easily-searched comment threads.
“The real benefits for us have been this worldwide accessibility and the ability to work in a single program where we are able to store huge amounts of data,” said Peter Jackson, director of products and technology at Seaspan. Just one drawing set for a ship is many gigabytes of data and Seaspan has thousands of drawings, he said.
This Seaspan division oversees a $3 billion ship-building program and has offices in Taiwan, China and Korea. Previously, the company relied on virtual private network connections into corporate databases for project updates and design sharing. “It was just too slow and it didn’t work very well,” said Mr. Jackson.
