Ship Management chews on the digital shipping pie

At Wilhelmsen Ship Management, we are already having a piece of that future since the turn of the new millennium.

Being an early adopter more than a decade ago, we deployed various digital reporting systems onboard as part of ship management operations.

These are the 3 main areas that were digitized for operational performance:

	Safety compliance Safety Management System Crew work & rest hours monitoring Situational awareness (ISPS)
	Regulation compliance Environmental Management Port Operation Management Continuous Improvement – Inspections
	Maintenance & Monitoring Planned Maintenance System Conditional Based Monitoring System Defect Reporting System

With systems in place, the amount of available data from vessels continue to grow.

The data contain large amounts of measuring points with a high sampling rate. As the dependencies and variety of systems deployed onboard increased, we saw the need to convert huge volumes of data into information that can be used for both operational and analytical purposes.

By using this data, we can help owners to achieve greener, safer and optimized operations. This digital print serves as foundation blocks for the big data era.

Generation: Big Data

Our journey for big data began in 2014. Substantial amount of work and effort were invested to establish our data warehouse. One of the goals of this project was to diminish silos and integrate information from the core business of ship management.

All vessels managed by WSM are analyzed with a business intelligence tool. The framework supporting this tool is a data warehouse, our holy grail of information that is fed by different web-based applications onboard.

The business intelligence tool churns and crunches data to extract consolidated reports and create analysis that are accessible to the relevant stakeholders for further action.

Making informed decisions

Through our business intelligence tool, we have established several correlations of events, vectors and root causes that contribute to our operational, energy and financial performance indicators. Having the right information, allows us to formulate solutions to effectively address the identified root cause.

Where we are now

We have moved from traditional management through alerts and reports to digital dashboards. Today, with big data we can perform statistical analysis and develop more dimensions of visualized reporting.

Going forth, we will increase our big data utilization to forecasting and scenario planning. Our eventual ambition is to achieve predictive modeling and optimization of ship management operations.

Digital map for tomorrow

Our current digital print was developed on a scalable foundation. This is essential to accommodate future digitization upgrades and expansions of ship management operations.

Enhancement of web-based applications and development of mobile applications are ongoing. Where possible, we will look into ways to digitize processes and reduce paper work onboard.

A good example of this initiative is the development of mobile application for internal audits. This application will be used during inspection, which captures results and uploads data simultaneously into the data warehouse. Thus, reducing manual paper work and time taken to prepare an audit inspection report.

Internet of Things (IoT)

…is high on our agenda and WSM sees it as a  very near possibility as we already have the right foundation to seamlessly capture and analyze IoT information into meaningful insights to deliver unparalleled data analytics. 

Moving ahead in real time. What about you?

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