About the project
HTEC provided a customized solution for a leading European shipping company that approached us intending to modernize their business, reduce data siloes, and increase efficiency. The client needed a robust platform to integrate various functionalities necessary for streamlined operations and efficient vessel management. Such a solution would serve as a single source of truth, enabling the client to digitize their entire shipping business and provide their personnel and customers with the tools to make data-driven decisions based on well-organized, real-time data sets.
Challenge
The shipping industry is volatile, fast-paced, and competitive. The client understood that the one of the ways they could reduce their carbon footprint and costs while increasing efficiency and making work easier for employees was through a modern system enabling them to leverage data science to optimize vessel and voyage management. There were three significant challenges to this project.
The first one was understanding the broader context of the maritime industry and its specifics, as well as the client’s overall business processes, history, and objectives.
The second was coordinating the platform implementation which depended on external, third-party solutions that were feeding necessary data to the platform. The client wanted to track all tanker and dry bulk vessels in the world, so our team needed to add another layer of moving data to the platform while ensuring that it looked sleek and easy to use.
Finally, it was essential that we build a routing solution into the platform that would substitute for the ineffective and expensive third-party service used at the time. Our team had to design a visual representation of all the moving vessels across the globe, with deviation waypoints and detailed distance and fuel consumption calculator, as well as smart navigation that avoids high-risk and suggests emission-controlled areas.
Solution
As mentioned, the platform’s primary goal was to offer the client’s personnel and customers a way to increase productivity and improve decision-making based on data intelligence. The state-of-the-art platform we built includes a responsive web application for monitoring and managing the vessels in real-time, and a mobile app designed to show data relevant only on the move, which is used for fast decision making. The data from third-party applications fed into the platform is used for visualization, allowing users to contribute fresh insights by manually entering data and comments. Historical vessel geo-location data and trajectories are used to analyze the market and to predict the best routes.
Before the platform was built, tracking the movement of vessels and assets was done through dozens of different applications, each one providing a fraction of value for the user, which indirectly affected the business and brought uncertainty into the decision-making process. This is why the platform pays particular attention to this segment, introducing transparency into a traditionally siloed environment. By harvesting information about all the tankers and dry bulk vessels worldwide, the platform can track and optimize the fleets’ sustainability and utilization. The routing solution offers accurate distance and time information, an emission calculator, and a consumption overview. Our team was able to relatively quickly prototype the solution, demonstrating a deep understanding of the maritime industry’s needs. HTEC’s engineers thus pioneered the digitalization of the shipping industry.
Success
Managing vessels, voyages, and cargoes are the platform’s central functions. It brought unprecedented clarity into the client’s operations, enabling their employees to optimize fleet management, reduce the company’s carbon footprint, and seamlessly track vessels. Our team has mastered the domain language of this specific industry. We helped the client improve the product and bring it to the market. Today, the platform serves as a central point of everyday operations, providing intelligent, data-driven insights to maritime industry professionals.
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