At this year's Nor-Shipping CEO Tor A. Svanes and COO Børge Hetland had a chat with Aaron Kelley at TradeWinds about NAVTORs e-Navigation and Performance strategy, and further technology development for meeting future demands and regulations.
See the film or read the full interview below.
Gentlemen, thanks for joining us. My first question relates to the myriad of providers of innovative e-Navigation solutions. These days, it feels like an increasingly crowded field. What does your organization do to distinguish yourselves from competitors?
Svanes:
“From the beginning we have concentrated on making an integrated system, so that everything is available to the navigator in one place, and then we have been building from there. We started with the Pay As You Sail (PAYS) for electronic charts and have been building further on that with publications as well as all other Information needed for e-Navigation. Then we concentrated on the updating of all charts and publications seamlessly, so that our customers will not have to do anything – as they are automatically updated.”
Reducing carbon emissions is, of course, top of mind for owners and operators these days, elaborating a little bit on your platforms, how can these platforms help ship owners, operators, stakeholders achieve what are increasingly aggressive targets when it comes to emissions?
Svanes:
“First of all, this has been our big investment for the last two, three years, because we see that what we call performance and e-Navigation fit very well together and must be together. Further development will help with emission and meeting all the regulations we see coming. Our goal here at Nor-Shipping is to show our newest advancements regarding CII and emission.”
Hetland
“Due to e-Navigation we developed a platform with an “outbox” (NavBox), onboard, creating a bulletproof ecosystem which works seamlessly between ship and shore. Now we are going to utilize this platform together with performance, using the NavBox to collect data and bring it back to shore to execute performance analytics.”
Partnerships is a theme of this year's Nor-Shipping. You have quite a few partnerships. Talk to us a little bit about your partnerships, and also what's the recipe for success when it comes to forging a mutually beneficial partnership?
Svanes:
“Our recipe for successful partnerships is creating win-win situations. Especially regarding emission, CII, and performance, we are not able to, or cannot take care of the entire data collection process. Hence, we look for partnerships helping with collection of data, specifically on the vessel. So that is the important thing we are considering in our partnerships.”
Hetland:
“There is a lot of talk about “big data,” but we would like to call it “smart data.” We want to take the data and transform it into valuable data we can benefit from immediately. And as Tor mentioned, we need partners to provide us with this data, as we do not collect it. We receive, absorb, and analyze the data, giving benefits back to the end user.”
Looking forward, you are at the end of the day, a technology company, right? What are some of your areas of focus looking ahead?
Svanes:
“Definitely technology. We consider ourselves a technology company and our biggest cost center is the development of technology, making our systems smarter and better. Currently machine learning, AI, is significant for this development, making life easier for people on board as well as improving the system on shore.”
Hetland:
“Building on that, I think it is all about collecting the data and having one single point of truth. You know all these data streams with the same information going from the vessel to the shore side. We aim to minimize the workload on board. If you enter the data, for example from a digital logbook, we can use this data and do performance analytics. Reducing the manual workload on board is what we are trying to achieve, focusing on the people on board. We want to make it easier for them to report and, of course, for the people in the office to be able to make good decisions.
And on that note, thank you gentlemen for your time, we appreciate it.