Deciding to start a vessel digitalization initiative can be challenging. Where to begin? How to begin? What drives costs? How to realize the benefits? What partner(s) do I need for this to become a success?
One of our most fundamental recommendations to any vessel owner/operator that wishes to digitalize their fleet is to start with the focus on a single use case. Although it may seem attractive to get access to all operational data from the vessel immediately, the likelihood of drowning in the massive data amounts increases. At the same time the likelihood of successfully generating value decreases.
Starting off the digitalization journey with a clear and sharp use case ensure that everyone focuses on solving one specific problem that realizes value immediately.
Starting off the digitalization journey with a clear and sharp use case ensure that everyone focuses on solving one specific problem that realizes value immediately. Tackling use cases one by one makes the digitalization initiative both feasible and comprehensive. You should still dream big, set bold ambitions, but ensure focus and start with one use case, before continuing to realize the ambition over time. With this approach, the importance of having an infrastructure in place that can tackle a broad set of use cases becomes paramount. Avoiding single purpose setups and opting for flexibility and scalability will ensure that the same infrastructure investment can be leveraged to generate value for your fleet over time.
Proprietary solutions add a limit to what vessel owners and operators can do. We believe that this represents a risk, since as an owner you do not know what use cases would become important for you at a later point in the future. With an open infrastructure, the vessel owner and operator have the flexibility to work with best of breed suppliers for any niche use case. Avoiding constraints from non-flexible suppliers is crucial and understanding this at an early stage will increase the likelihood of success.
The industry is challenged by lacking standardization and varying data quality – which represents hurdles that must be overcome by any player that wishes to take part in the digital future. At first glance this might seem like a small topic, but ensuring that operational data is reliable and comparable across a fleet of heterogenous vessels can be a daunting task. This challenge requires both strong experience from vessel digitalization and deep maritime domain expertise.
Making sure everything runs reliably and as expected onboard shouldn’t be overlooked either. The environment in which the infrastructure runs is far from stable - vessels will experience connectivity issues, many different stakeholders from crew, owners, OEMs, vessel IT etc will be involved, and changes will be required. Ensuring that you have an infrastructure partner capable of handling these complexities from the beginning will save both time and cost.
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Marta Alonso Pontes
Delivery Lead
Marta Alonso Pontes is Delivery Lead at Raa Labs ensuring successful customer implementations.
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