Commercial shipping, the cornerstone of the maritime industry, attempts to achieve the complex task of moving cargo from one port to another into a cost effective, safe and repeatable process. In order to do this, stakeholders gradually shift from traditional methods to newer and more advanced technology, for example, leaving behind physical documents and conventional communication for the world of digital documents, phone calls, and emails. 

PDFs, emails and spreadsheets are general (if effective) technical solutions. In many industries, dedicated software has looked to replace these general solutions with a specific solution – which can offer productivity increases above the general technology. This class of technology is often sold as a software on a subscription, referred to as a ‘Saas’ company. You can see the prevalence of such an approach in the marketing copy these companies use, for example, the following quotes were taken direct from companies websites in the maritime sector:

• Portchain: “Are you tired of using spreadsheets, emails and phone calls to align your berth schedules?”
• Tradeline: “No more Excel spreadsheets, Sharepoint or shared folders…”
• Octopi: “…‘replacing pen and paper, Excel and older TOS Systems’”

This ‘saasification’ has already happened in many industries, but the maritime industry seems slower to adopt it. Primarily, this is probably due to the lower bandwidth of internet commonly available on ships. The lower bandwidth makes reliable access to these platforms less possible and therefore reduces their utility over lower bandwidth solutions like email. However, due to the rise of companies like Elon Musk’s Starlink, Shipznet or Inmarsat – ships are now able to utilize technologies that run on the ‘Cloud’ to a much greater extent.  

Compounding the benefits of specialist softwares, more modern platforms are looking to leverage additional advanced technologies to deliver an edge for their customers, including:

• Blockchain: blockchain is a decentralised ledger of information held between a peer network – which enables allows more transparency and verification of database information.
• Artificial Intelligence: Artificial Intelligence is a general term for computer technologies that allow complex processing and decision making – this allows a much more complex and holistic use of data. 

While we have focussed the review on Saas companies, there are also companies (like marketplaces etc.) which benefit from a lot of the same market forces that have propelled Saas companies. These are included too in the review where appropriate. The ‘Saasification is illustrated by focussed on four areas of maritime operations: Optimising Voyage Routes, Port Management, Improving Manual Operations & Maintenance and Streamlining Crew Management. 

Optimizing Voyage Routes

There are many startups identified offering various voyage optimisation platforms which offer benefits over the traditional plotting of routes. Dataloy, for example, maintains extensive data about journey distances, which can be used to improve above manual use of charts. Their platform also enables ship operators to understand how different routes will affect fuel consumption and efficiency. Companies like Optimum Voyage, Bluepulse or i4Sea add weather monitoring into the planning of a route, enabling a seamless integration of data that would be difficult with manual plotting. Wärtsilä and Intelligent Cargo Systems connect information about berth availability to the navigation system, to enable ‘just in time’ arrivals. The ‘Slow Steaming’ that this allows enables increase in efficiency in fuel usage. These startups are increasingly using more and more streams of information to provide functionality that generic spreadsheets and manual plotting can’t compete with. 

Furthermore, some platforms don’t just plot the ideal route for a single voyage, but instead look at the whole fleet as a whole. Seaber, for example, helps run multiple different possible route and cargo options for an entire fleet to maximise Time Charter Equivalent (a standard shipping industry performance measure used to calculate the average daily revenue performance of a vessel) for the entire fleet, not just one vessel.

Port Management

There are also many companies in the Port Management sector, which is a clear example of startups which are helping companies move from spreadsheet based tracking and organization to a more optimized solution. These often rely on a platform that allows both ships and port managers to coordinate without relying on email, VHF and phone. For example, Portchain is a cloud solution which replaces a spreadsheet that used to hold information about the various berths and timings of ship arrivals, with a cloud platform that both carriers and terminal operators can login to – bringing the advantages of instant updates and other specialist information like wait times at the ports on a ships journey which might delay its arrival. 

Similarly, Dockwa is connecting predominately leisure mariners and port owners via the cloud to increase efficiencies. They offer a seamless online system to enable bookings in a sector that would usually have been managed either by hand or through a spreadsheet. 

Improving Manual Operations and Maintenance

Another set of Saas companies aim to increase the efficiency of manual operation checks. Kaiko Systems’ platform is utilised by operators to fulfill manual checks, and live feedback is given if the system detects there might be analogies or issues in the data entry. Once validated, the data is then processed to deduce insights and identify issues before they become significant in an example of ‘predictive maintenance’. This is significant as in a 2019 review of safety in shipping, 9,000 of just over 26,000 issues on ships were due to machinery damage – twice as much as the next reported category of incidents. 

Streamlining Crew Management

Lastly, the management of crew is a very labour intensive job which is often managed through emails and spreadsheets. All of the 1M crew members who go to sea every year have to be checked for qualifications, medical checks and appropriate passports, and many of them need travel assistance to get to their port they are leaving from.

Both Singapore based Maritime One & UK-based Ankaa Marine, for example, allow a ‘Linkedin Style’ community platform for employers to be able to search through prospective mariners with the correct qualifications. Furthermore, Ankaa removes the reliance on email to fulfill document checks by allowing mariners to upload their documents as part of application and recruitment of seafarers for a new journey. They also conduct some automated checks, store these documents within a portal which can be updated and have an optimized backend for reaching out to users for further information. This far exceeds what a general solution like Excel would be able to do.

Companies like Grey Wing and C Teleport automates the booking of travel, like airline flights, in order to help crew members get to the right port with less manual booking being involved. Grey Wing was also the first maritime startup to integrate OpenAI’s ChatGPT to further reduce reliance on email, by processing and summarizing large numbers of emails into an easy format. 

Solutions like Ankaa and Ocean Technologies’ Compas allow management of crew while onboard, helping to monitor crew members for upcoming medical check requirements or managing rotas. To further help the automation required in managing the recruitments of crew members. 

Conclusion

Clearly, there is a startup building a cloud based platform to replace almost any spreadsheet ship owners are currently using. With the advent of satellite based affordable high speed internet, this market is currently in a growth stage – with significant opportunities open to these startups.