Data’s vital role in maritime business resilience
Ship owners and operators must maintain business continuity amid multiple global supply chain challenges, including geopolitical conflict and extreme weather. Leaders should reap the business insights of harmonised data and AI that will help minimise risks we can control and boost efficiency and resilience amid a global supply chain in flux, explains Marcura’s Janani Yagnamurthy, VP, Analytics PortLog and ClaimsHub.
To maintain strong business and stakeholder relationships, ship owners, operators and managers cannot afford to be seen as the weak link in the broader supply chain. However, in recent years black swan events, including the pandemic, more frequent and unpredictable extreme weather events, as well as recent and ongoing geopolitical conflict, have made maintaining business continuity a near-constant challenge.
To stay resilient and profitable amid what is set to continue to be an unpredictable operating environment, ship owners, managers, operators and their staff must look to what challenges can be better predicted and managed. This requires a move away from traditional ways of working or trusting your gut. Savvy maritime leaders will be exploring the power of AI in growing business resilience. However, high-quality data is essential for AI to be effective; when big data and AI are leveraged properly, and supported by robust data and machine learning models, they become powerful tools to normalise risk and maintain a competitive edge.
So, in a world, and supply chain, that these days feel so in flux, what can we better control and optimise? Ship owners, operators and charterers regularly flag two major pain points that impact business resilience and efficiency of operations: delays in ports and the resulting costs, time and admin associated with demurrage claims. Data for the latter is often fragmented in the demurrage claims process and can take on average five months to resolve per claim. By digitising and automating the analysis of huge amounts of port call data and laytime documents, combined with human expertise and the latest vertical AI tools, companies can drastically reduce these risks and help a smoother running of operations to meet charter party contracts.
Harmonising data
To optimise port calls and limit laytime requires a number of data-led insights that can only be gained by digitising hundreds of Statement of Facts (SoF). From there you can begin to benchmark the costs and risks of specific ports and how this varies depending on variables like holidays and weather. You can even drill down to specific terminals and their own unique restrictions if there is enough quality and quantity of data to do so.
For faster, accurate and defensible laytime claims, as well as gaining insights to refine the terms of your charter party agreements, you’d need to create a process to digitise all your laytime documents and build a system to automate checks for data completeness and accuracy. Both solutions would help to streamline business processes, save money and improve customer relationships.
But trying to do this kind of work in-house is for many, an impossible task and a third-party specialist company is required. Most ship owners, operators and management companies are, after all, not huge multinationals with deep pockets and skilled IT and AI experts working around the clock.
And even for companies that can afford in-house data analysis teams to search for insights, they are still limited to analysing data from their own company. Focusing for a minute on port calls, a company’s insights in analysing their own data will be interesting and provide some actionable insights. Much better, though, is to be able to benchmark against thousands of companies’ port call data, building out a truer and fuller picture of the costs and turnaround times at ports globally – even ones you may only call at once or twice a year.
For example, at Marcura, we have data from over 2 million port calls gathered over the past 20 years, have digitised more than 38.2 million events from more than 600,000 in SoFs as well as data from more than 4,000 ports, and 11,500 terminals. These layers and depth of data mean we can connect the dots that companies otherwise would never even see and carry out the necessary analysis for much deeper and more accurate insights.
The right match
The number of data points is not the only thing to consider. For any ship owner or manager trying to decide what data solution is going to give them the most valuable insights, I always tell them to assess the three V’s: volume of data (is it coming from 100 SoFs or millions), veracity of data (where is the company sourcing the data, what types of data is being used and how is it cleaned and made accurate) and value (what is the value and impact to you and your company). For the latter, this also includes ease of use and the amount of administrative burden it will reduce for staff – all key to creating a more efficient and resilient business.
When assessing impact, ask yourself how the data and platform will help teams to visualise trends effectively. Can it benchmark against wider industry data? Query how it can help reduce risks such as revenue leakage or identify bad business or counterparties. Find hard data to understand how it has improved budgeting or saved time for other companies.
For example, Marcura’s ClaimsHub can significantly speed up the document collection and calculation process, reducing the time involved by several days and allowing customers to save up to 20% of their FTE time thanks to the more efficient workflow. With PortLog, Customers benefit from an increase in the accuracy of port turnaround estimates that impact P&L. Moreover, PortLog also helps customers identify riskier business and helps mitigate risks by making qualified decisions using an analytical framework, rather than a purely gut feeling.
Importantly, companies must consider how it can integrate into its current systems and what time it can free up staff to work on more high-value areas of the business. Ultimately it should all come back to, how does this build resilience and normalise risk in our company?
Vertical artificial intelligence
The power of artificial intelligence (AI) combined with big data can be incredibly valuable in helping companies to find new ways of working and streamlining operations. But it is only useful if used correctly; it is not a panacea and should be backed up by human expertise. Be wary of AI washing – companies may try to overstate its role or capabilities in their software to try and capitalise on AI hype to attract more business. Decision makers should maintain a healthy scepticism of AI claims being made by technology firms – always interrogate the data and systems that underpin it. It can be easy to be dazzled by this new technology and its capabilities, but remember, AI is simply a subset of machine learning – something we have been using for more than 20 years.
Importantly, if you’re looking for high-value, specialised business insights, you need vertical AI. What this means is an AI model tailored to address specific business processes and challenges for your industry, vs horizontal AI that will provide generalised and high-level answers.
For example, with Marcura’s solutions, our vertical AI sits above and pulls from multiple horizontal layers of extensive ranges of specialised data, such as port costs, terminal data, statements of facts, time and weather variables, and contractual data. This gamut of data comes from different data aggregators, and the data is cleansed through our machine-learning algorithms. This means that you could ask our AI system how to find cost savings with a specific charter party contract on the most relevant terms and impactful clauses or to analyse weather conditions, freight pricing, budgeting or vessel arrival times. It will assess all the data for your team and provide a clear and succinct answer to help guide your decision-making.
Using the right AI will lead to the desired time savings, cost savings and unique insights that can help make businesses more efficient and resilient. However, regardless of which technology they use, human expertise is essential to provide nuanced insights and solutions, as well as to ensure the accuracy of any outcome produced.
The right use and application of technology, combined with human insight, can set businesses apart from their competitors, making them more able to deal with risks and become more efficient and cost-effective. So, in a world of uncertainties and challenges to business continuity, let’s normalise risk and utilise all the tools at our disposal to find new and smarter ways to overcome them.
