Peter Mantel, Managing Director, BMT Smart, highlights the benefits of Fleet Performance Management and calls for the shipping companies to take a Managed Service approach as many benefits are being involved. In 2017, Mr. Mantel anticipates the industry to modernise further by using the many available data-driven technologies that have changed radically the maritime landscape.
SAFETY4SEA: Focusing on your area of expertise, what were the most important industry developments within 2016?
Peter Mantel: Fleet Performance Management has finally come of age, and is now recognised as a key part of every shipping company’s operations. Advances in technology, connectivity and data collection have made the Fleet Performance Management Industry more complex. Consequently, many ship owners are neither seeing the results that Fleet Performance Management can deliver, nor getting a return from their investment. Despite early wins for many ship owners around Fleet Performance Management, there is still a significant opportunity to make game changing performance gains.
S4S: Focusing on your area of expertise, what do you think that it will be the biggest smart shipping challenge(s) for the industry for the 2017?
P.M.: To drive value out of Fleet Performance Management, ship owners face a tough challenge. On one hand they need to ensure interoperability across all the different hardware on vessels to extract the valuable performance data, whilst on the other hand they need the expertise to turn the immense amounts of information into insightful and actionable data.
The reality is that there are very few vendors that have the product range and expertise to provide a one stop shop to ship owners. What’s more, due to the growing complexity of Fleet Performance Management, shipping companies are finding it more and more expensive and time consuming to build the skills in-house
S4S: What would be the 2017 resolutions for your company/ organization?
P.M.: Outside the shipping industry, when enterprises have been faced with similar challenges, they have turned to outsourcing complex and non-core activities to Managed Service providers to reduce operational costs whilst accessing best in class expertise to improve business outcomes for a fixed fee.
It is time for shipping companies to take a Managed Service approach to Fleet Performance Management and BMT SMART will be able to deliver a complete service offering:
- Actionable insight around fleet performance
- Fleet wide results
- Improved return from existing investments
- Faster time to benefit
- Lower setup costs
- Lower operational costs
S4S: What is your overall forecast for smart shipping in 2017 and what would you like to share and/or wish and/or ask other industry stakeholders?
P.M.: The industry will modernise; we will see Data-driven change to the maritime industry. Improved satellite connectivity, a network of sensors and next-generation computing power allows vessels to capture and analyse information. Weather, ocean current data, engine performance and location information can be combined and analysed to dramatically improve vessel capacity, performance, profitability and regulatory compliance
The views presented hereabove are only those of the author and not necessarily those of SAFETY4SEA and are for information sharing and discussion purposes only.