For a long time now, industry players have invested in technologies that increase operational efficiency within the boundaries of their own business. While such investments have contributed to increased profitability and better KPIs for individual organizations, they have also resulted in localized optimization, often at the cost of overall performance, resulting in massive amounts of waste across the maritime ecosystem. Industry leaders increasingly recognize the next wave of value creation will come from examining and improving cross-organizational business processes such as booking integrity, schedule reliability, or pit-stop port operations, among others.
2018 has been very promising for companies offering technology solutions that enable cross-organizational process coordination in ways that allow all parties to arrive at better decisions or, at the minimum, make data-driven tradeoffs that are more informed. I am hopeful 2019 will build on this momentum and we will see some existing technologies go mainstream and nascent ones emerge.
The enabling factors are here and now. On the technology front, cloud computing and PaaS lower the barrier to entry for solution providers. SaaS applications eliminate the capex and provide low time to value. Applications are increasingly providing open APIs using widely accepted protocols like REST, making it possible to combine real time data from multiple systems and provide visibility to anyone (within or outside the organization boundaries) anytime and anywhere.
The business conditions are ripe for adoption of such solutions; low profitability combined with expensive compliance requirements are whetting the appetite for solutions that have the potential to lower operating costs.
In order to be successful, these technologies have to seamlessly integrate with current processes and ways of operating. Visibility solutions that purely consume data with the aim of providing insights to other stakeholders will have a steep adoption challenge. Solutions that provide immediate and integrated operational value to both the generator and consumer are likely to have a better chance at success.