3 Steps for Building a Market-Leading Data Strategy

The maritime industry is witnessing a surge in promising technology solutions. While this is important for the evolution of the industry, it also poses efficiency challenges. With so many disparate solutions and increasing volumes of data (over 120 million data points each day), industry players are finding it difficult to build strong data strategies by connecting data to their daily decisions.

Regardless of the technology solutions and data sources you have chosen to meet your business goals, these systems and sources must come together to bring the right information to the right people at the right time and in the right format. Further, this information must be trustworthy enough to make decisions with confidence. 

The importance of data and data-driven decisions within the maritime sector has been a key theme in our conversations with clients and other industry players, including the need for validated, contextual data sets and standardized data formats. To lay the groundwork for their data advantage, industry stakeholders are turning to technology partners to elevate and integrate three critical areas of their workflows: data collection, data delivery, and data validation.

In a recent webinar, we delved into how maritime software solutions can transform data into meaningful insights that are timely, relevant, and contextual. Access the full webinar here.

Let’s explore how to develop a scalable maritime data strategy through data collection, validation, and delivery with a closer look at how we at Veson have woven these processes into our solutions.

Data Collection

Data collection means primarily two things: gathering internal data produced by your business and selecting external data sources that provide you with commercially relevant information. In both instances, you will want to implement processes that ensure data being collected are of high quality and can support sound business decisions.

For example, say you want to incorporate AIS data on vessel positions into your chartering workflows. For these data to have high value and save your chartering team time and effort, they must be incorporated into your workflows in an effective way. In the Veson IMOS Platform, AIS positional information is collected externally and presented within the platform on a visual map. From there, you can programmatically import vessel particulars into the platform for use in estimate calculations through to post-voyage performance assessments. 

Data Delivery

Data delivery involves how information is presented to users. Effective data delivery presents data on time and in context to facilitate informed decision-making. The context of any data point involves the wider factors at play in the decision being made, as well as other related data points. Slow data can hinder competitiveness, while delivering data without context confronts users with a confusing mix of both the ’signal’ and the ’noise,’ rather than a clear signal. Examples of data delivery challenges include handling large data volumes without the ability to extract actionable insights, dealing with inconsistent or siloed datasets, and needing to adapt delivery mechanisms to keep pace with changing user requirements. A robust data delivery strategy navigates these pitfalls with customizable workflows to surface relevant information when most needed, integrated and shareable datasets for full context, and improved standardization of data formats.

In your chartering workflow, for example, effective data delivery can make or break the efficiency and effectiveness of your evaluations. Say you are assessing whether a vessel falls inside or outside your defined company policy. Rapid understanding of its port call history is very valuable at this point and will also help you down the road with counterparty negotiations and planning. Within the IMOS Platform, this information is delivered to your chartering teams in context and without having to leave the system. In your operations workflow, knowing when the vessel will arrive at its next destination allows you to keep downstream customers informed about their shipments. Veson’s market intelligence solution, Oceanbolt, pulls data from AIS sources and runs them through algorithms that clean and organize them, before presenting them directly in the IMOS Platform in a way that is relevant and useful to you.

Data Validation

Validated data are data that prove trustworthy enough to base significant business decisions on. In the maritime sector, organizations require the ability to confirm the accuracy and relevance of external data sources, and to benchmark their internal data against a reference point. However, a common challenge we hear about is how difficult and expensive it is to evaluate the quality and suitability of primary data sources. Further, data sets vary in their commercial criticality, warranting different levels of validation.

The accuracy and relevance of your data is a key factor in your ability to sharpen your estimates and conduct business in a compliant and sustainable way. An example of data validation at Veson is a physics-based model built by VesselsValue to estimate vessel fuel consumption and CO2 emissions using information about the performance and activity of those vessels. These data, calibrated against official sources, can be used for rapid sense-checking of fuel and emissions metrics reported from within your business and from your suppliers.

Building a holistic data strategy with Veson

At Veson, we recognize the impact that accurate, relevant, and validated data can have on both your commercial success and our collective environmental sustainability. Over the past two decades, we’ve undertaken a digital journey of our own to support the maritime industry with innovative solutions for its digital transformations. With the addition of Q88, Oceanbolt, and VesselsValue in recent years, we are uniting data collection, delivery, and validation solutions to establish a sturdy foundation for you to build comprehensive data strategies upon. For further insights and live demonstrations of Veson’s suite of solutions, access the on-demand recording of our Data and Tech Trends Webinar.