You want to get where? Well, I wouldn’t start from here…

Intermanager secretary-general Kuba Szymanski has what might be described as a ‘combative’ style. This is the man who once made a presentation on risk management comparing the chartering process to dating his teenage daughter, leaving no-one in any doubt on what would be required to prove one’s suitability.

He’s no stranger to a challenge either. A couple of week-ends ago, he completed an 85 mile ‘Parish Walk’ around the Isle of Man for charity in 23 hours 50 minutes. At the GVF Maritime Insights 2012 event last week, Szymanski took another challenge: telling a roomful of VSAT vendors that they needed to up their game if they wanted to sell systems to shipmanagers and owners.

He began with a prescient comparison. The sextant is still a compulsory piece of equipment onboard, yet it is rarely if ever used. Szymanski admitted only his personal stubbornness meant that he still used one at all.

“I needed 18 months of training to be qualified on something haven’t used in anger in 20 years. But I could use the VSAT 100 times a day. How much training do I have on VSAT? Zero. Without VSAT we can still navigate, but take away the sextant and we cannot.”

The VSAT vendors needed a reality check, he suggested. Why was there no certificate of proficiency for computers? If VSAT is so important why is there no training? It is little use telling managers that an eight year old could use VSAT because a 48 year old would struggle.

For comparison, when Szymanski was at sea in 1985 the latest cutting edge computer was the ZX Spectrum and computer use onboard ship was barely heard of. The speed of change since then has surpassed all expectations but inside the shipping industry some things haven’t changed at all.

A master, he explained works on contract, is highly paid, works long hours – is expected to get on with things and expects things to work. This was relatively simple when GMDSS was introduced because Inmarsat’s regulated status meant high reliability, a standard seafarers became used to.

“We still whinged about it, but it was reliable. But all of sudden new systems appeared. Our expectation was similar, but this equipment does 40-60% of what was promised. It has immediately got a bad name because it was sold on the premise that it would be the same if not better than Inmarsat and it never was. We cannot get the same reliability from VSAT that our charterers expect from us,” he said.

If VSAT was sold in the same way as charters were negotiated, he said, then users would be defaulting on their bills. Part of the problem he said was that there is no definition of broadband.

“You would all have one but they wouldn’t all agree. You can’t deliver on something you can’t define. If I am paying $3,000 a month for 24/7 broadband but you are delivering 23.59/7 then I shouldn’t be paying you,” he declared.

This, as you might expect didn’t go down terribly well with the assembled VSAT sellers and I felt more than a twinge of sympathy for them. Szymanski got a lesson from delegates on ‘best effort’, contention ratios, maximum information rates and the rest, but he was not to be deflected. This was a challenge that was turning into a crusade.

“Our expectations are not flexible. This is what we wanted and you haven’t delivered. The problem is you don’t know the industry you are selling to. You haven’t done your homework so it is not a surprise that our expectations are not met,” he continued.

Those who know and admire Szymanski of course knew where this was driving: the Key Performance Indicators project that he has embarked on for Intermanager, based on his experience that it is pretty difficult to measure something if you don’t know where to hold one end of the tape. This is not to say that he did not want the VSAT guys to succeed – this was the Global VSAT Forum after all – and the whole point is to encourage better, cost-effective solutions that are easy for owners to adopt and use.

GVF will be looking into how to run a similar KPI programme on VSAT and by the next event, I suspect we will see the vendors come back with reinforcements – they will need some pretty heavy weapons.

“When seafarers can choose between a ship with internet and one without for the same salary, then there is a good argument for VSAT, but unfortunately there is nothing tangible to go with. We need to call a spade a spade and to know how big the glass is.

“I can only see benefits but we need to show a baseline. We have never measured how much it costs when you lose a master and VSAT makes this kind of difference. At the moment, you are selling something we can’t measure.”