Should we be sharing more data?

Holger Ritter of maritime IT company DRYNET

Shipping companies may be able to find efficiencies in operation by sharing their data with others. But which data specifically? Where might you lose competitive advantage? Should safety data be shared?

“When you share data, you know more, what is happening in my world, your world, how all these points connect,” said Arun Sankar, Director of commercial and strategy development, Northern Europe, with Columbia Shipmanagement, a large ship management company.

He was speaking at People Tech Maritime event in Hamburg in May.

Data sharing can lead to opportunities to improve profitability. Shipmanagement companies need to achieve a certain scale to survive, because the profit margin per ship is very low. But they may be able to improve profitability or reduce costs through collaboration. This requires communication, which requires trust, he said.

An example of this is when Columbia made a partnership with its competitor Bernard Schulte Shipmanagement in 2018, to make an independent procurement company for consumables, GenPro.

The biggest reason not to collaborate are concerns about commercial risks, he said. But when companies look at the issues in detail, they may see there are very little risks, data sharing can be controlled, and there may be additional profit as a result of sharing.

An issue to consider is who benefits from the data sharing. An oil company chartering multiple tankers has an interest in encouraging the operators to share, and tanker operators have an interest in being in a good relationship with the oil company. But in other situations companies may not see there is enough benefit, he said.

Digital integration

A related topic is supporting integration of software systems in shipping. Mr Sankar sees the various maritime software packages like balls hanging on a Christmas tree. They all do something separate, but would benefit from a framework to connect them together, as the Christmas tree connects the baubles.

Once such a framework was established, other software tools could “plug and play” onto it, he said.  

“The whole [maritime] industry is fragmented, compared to aviation, which is much more standardised.”

Nikolaj von Wartburg

When companies can share data openly with each other it will be a tipping point, agreed Nikolaj von Wartburg, Head of Europe with Synergy Marine Group, another large ship management company.

Companies might not want to collaborate because they are afraid of losing a competitive advantage they believe they have, such as having more effective operations than their competitor.

But if every management company thinks their operations are more effective than their competitors, it is clear that at least one of them is wrong, he said.

You can control which data you share, for example sharing operational data but not commercial data, he said.

“I think we need to get a bit more brave in the maritime industry and say, ‘these are the data sets we need to share,’” he said.

A challenge for ship managers is that their clients, the shipowners, do not always want to share data. “I see some owners that are willing to share, and some owners that are not willing to share,” he said.

Sharing incidents and defects

Shipping companies should share more data about incidents, Mr von Wartburg said. The tanker sector already does this, much more than other shipping sectors.

“When you share you get a data set 20 x as big as your own,” he said.

You see something that was not on your radar before. You see [other] people have had incidents [and think] ‘let's make sure we don't run into that.’”

One oil company analysis of incidents found that the biggest cause of injuries onboard ships was mooring incidents.

Another “top three” cause was lifeboat cables breaking during drills. As a result, Mr von Wartburg’s company at the time looked at all their lifeboat cables, and found many were worn beyond what they should be.

Shipping companies could also share information about defects (technical problems on a ship), he said. But here, there are concerns that being open about defects could lead to operational problems.

Some charterers may ask for the defect to be rectified at the next opportunity, but others may be much tougher and say the vessel cannot come into a certain terminal until it is fixed. “That's a concern when you share, for sure.”

Mr Papachristidis from Hellespont added that in the tanker sector, companies are asked by some of their major customers, such as Shell, to come together and talk about safety related experiences. But it only happens because the customer pushed it, the shipping companies would not have done it otherwise.

In the tanker forums for sharing experiences, it is not specific data points which are shared, but the overall picture, he said.

It could be useful if the broader shipping industry had a place for collecting safety incident reports, without being pushed by oil company customers, even if anonymised, he said.

There are often many different elements leading to an incident, making it unique. It would be useful for the issues to be widely understood in the industry, he said.

It can be helpful for seafarers to know about incidents happening in shipping companies around the world, so they are aware of the risks of what they are doing, he said, because incidents in any single ship or company can be very rare. “If they look at a checklist as [just] another piece of paper, that can have serious consequences.”

Columbia’s Mr Sankar added that shipping companies are required to learn from their own incidents, through updating their safety management systems. But this process can take weeks.

Protecting competitive advantage?

Ship management has become fairly standardised as a service, Mr Papachristidis said.

“Gone are the days when ship managers and owners could create their unique selling proposition, saying ‘we do this on our ships and they don't’”.

This means that companies do not have any competitive advantage in the way they run their vessels, and so no reason not to share operational data. “I’m a believer in sharing data and collaborating with people,” he said.

It is too easy to talk in broad general terms about data sharing,” Mr Papachristidis said. “The question is what level of data, what are we talking about specifically. It is one thing to share data, another to share interpretation of the data.”

Other comments

Niklas Weidmann from crew change management software company Tilla would like to see passport data shared directly between software applications, rather than by e-mail.

It can be common for more and more people to be added to email chains. “This is not the safest way of sharing sensitive data,” he said.

Holger Ritter of maritime IT company DRYNET said he saw two cruise ship cybersecurity managers speak to each other for the first time at an event organised by his cyber maritime organisation.

“They found immediately there are so many joint topics they can talk about and work on without disclosing any company secrets,” he said.

“Hackers share, so we have to share too.”