Kicking and screaming – and that’s just the shipowners
With apologies for the hiatus, I had to spend some time attending to client work, hence the radio silence from www.maritimeinsight.com. The summer seemed to give me a certain amount of cover but given that it’s September and London International Shipping Week it seemed high time to get back into the fray.
And as this blog began with Inmarsat – and in the process gave its competitors something to complain about – it seems reasonable to pick up where I left off before getting back into the wider issues around communications and technology.
You have to hand it to Frank Coles, Inmarsat Maritime CEO: he doesn’t give the impression of caring much what people what think of him as long as he gets the message across.
As lead sponsor of the Fathom Ship Efficiency conference this week, Coles might have been expected to make a few genial observations about the roadmap for maritime communications and retire. After all, the company was due to host its own seminar the following day.
What we got instead was Classic Coles – combative and uncompromising, challenging the industry and his previous speakers from AP Moller-Maersk and Wartsila that if shipping wants to achieve the energy efficiency measures that are required for economic and regulatory reasons, it has to make better communications part of the mix.
“If shipping had changed as fast as information technology we would be moving cargo on 50 knot unmanned LNG-powered catamarans. Instead, shipowners are still being dragged kicking and screaming towards an era of better connectivity,” he said.
Coles has clearly taken a dose of futurology as he suggested that tomorrow’s ship’s master might be kitted out with Google Glass and driving the ship on an iPad “that way he can be on his email and looking out of the window at the same time,” he quipped. “We have already had our first internet-based collisions and it will continue to be a problem.”
That communications is ‘100,000 times cheaper and 50-100 times faster’ gives the shipping industry the tool it needs to run vessels more efficiently but has not been used, he said.
And the perpetrators of this situation? Shipowners of course. Owners he suggested, spend money for two reasons, “because they are made to or because they think they can save money”. Coles suggested that comms was the key enabler of the monitoring of onboard systems for energy management and compliance but that few owners were taking advantage of a real-time data stream off the ship.
“It seems incredible to me that while everyone will give their kids a cellphone so they can try and find out where they are, $100m worth of ship and cargo aren’t worth a similar type of investment,” he said.
The refrain that purchasing managers are herded by management consultants to drive costs lower and lower is not new, but referring to his customers as “crocodiles; large animals with small ears, small eyes and small brains who only say price, price, price” created plenty of amusement.
His point – that comms represents perhaps 0.3 of daily running costs and that the average ship according to Inmarsat, spends just $25 a day on staying in touch – is far more serious, particularly with bunkers at $6-700 per tonne.
“And yet we are still told communications is too expensive. Something is wrong in the mindset,” he continued. “A company will spend $100,000 taking off the bulbous bow but they don’t get the big picture. Ships need to be in touch.”
Well he would say that wouldn’t he? But Inmarsat estimates that an owner can save double that, or potentially 10% of running costs, not bad for an annual investment of $36,000.
“The industry has to change. We’ll be driven there of course but it would be nice if we didn’t have regulators drive us there one more time,” he concluded.
Given that his predecessor on the panel, AP Moller-Maersk’s Niels-Bjorn Mortensen was among those giving their ships nose jobs, it seemed logical to ask if the company was leveraging this kind of communications intelligence. He seemed unconvinced.
But it was a theme that cropped up more than once during the day, in the process adding weight to Coles’ argument. Monitoring not just of ship, engine, route, hull performance and cargo, as well as reporting of carbon and black carbon emissions too are either on the menu or coming, depending on whom you believe. The green NGOs pretty much rubbed their hands with glee, which I guess was not his original intention either.
The information management system vendors brought the argument full circle by the end of the day. Jon Agust Thorsteinsson, co-founder and CEO of Marorka told delegates that the real challenge for shipping was how to manage the stream of data coming off the ship, turning it first into information and then into knowledge.
Mr Mortensen’s reluctance to give a firm endorsement could be taken either as evidence that Maersk Maritime Technology is already working on something similar (it has the habit of innovation so it’s quite possible) or that owners see bigger problems.
Gather a big bunch of data from the fleet and you need brains and bodies to interpret it and turn it into actionable information. With many superintendents already running more ships with the same or fewer resources they are unlikely to want more work to do.
That suggests to me at least, that this task will be subbed out to the same management consultants whose job is to drive down costs even further, to the presumed chagrin of more than just Frank Coles.