Beware of the single purpose solution
Think through why you are interested in operational data before choosing a solution. The wrong choice will limit your digital potential in the future.
Mind “the why”
As a vessel owner there are many ways you are exposed to potential solutions to the “digital race” you might feel you need to take part in. You probably read about other companies, and probably competitors as well, doing “a lot digital”. This may make you trigger-happy to follow suit. That could be all good and well, just keep in mind why you want to embark on digitalizing your vessels when considering your options.
It is all about the data
Firstly, having reliable and high quality data is the foundation for your future digital initiatives. This is not the area to make any shortcuts. The traditional saying “garbage in, garbage out” shouldn’t be forgotten as it still holds true. Secondly you need to be able to focus broadly, pursuing many different use cases as your needs develop over time. Don’t go for a single purpose solution doing one thing only, when you know that your future digital ambitions will require data for many different initiatives going forward. No one knows the needs of tomorrow, so make sure you maintain your flexibility.
Lacking standardization and insufficient data quality will hold you back
Some of the major challenges that you aim to solve by using data from your vessels, need to be properly addressed across your entire fleet. If not, you cannot compare the performance across vessels, which leaves you nowhere. In order to compare across vessels and different systems, you need to be able to contextualize data across equipment types. This increases the complexity and deep domain knowledge is required to do this well. The same applies for quality assurance of the data. After all, simply piping data through to the cloud is the easy part.
Keep your scale, don’t limit yourself with specific equipment types
If you end up with a single purpose solution created by a specific equipment vendor, you will only have that available for the vessels where that equipment is present. That’s a lock-in that you as a vessel owner should try to avoid as it limits your ability to scale solutions, insights and value across your fleet. Even more so if you regularly change the composition of your fleet by adding or divesting vessels.
A heterogenous fleet drives the need for a vendor agnostic solution
If you, as most vessel owners or operators, have a heterogenous fleet, with vessels differing in technical setup with different systems and makers across vessels, you are dependent on being able to capture data from any equipment type or maker. You are dependent on getting that data both contextualized and quality assured so that you can manage your entire fleet through one coherent setup. After all, that’s the only way you benefit from your scale. Dividing everything with multiple solutions will give you a challenge when your fleet needs to be managed differently vessel by vessel, depending on the actual equipment present on the different vessels.
We are great believers that you should focus on what you can do really well
It is challenging to be good at all things. Being a world-class supplier of an onboard system or sensor does not mean that you are world-class at offering vessel data as a service. It is not that it is not doable, but the question is if you as an owner is better off with an OK single purpose solution rather than with a world-class multi purpose solution? If ROI, scaleability, data quality and the usability of the data is important to you, you should definitely opt for the latter.
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