Hello and welcome.
I’m joined by Ollie Raymond, Global Director of Shipping and Offshore at Polestar Global.
Thank you so much for joining me.
Thanks for having me anytime now.
Given the current geopolitical situation, what’s your take on the challenges the industry is facing?
So we’re pretty uniquely placed at postal with lines of business that cover shipping and offshore financial markets, government services and defence.
So we’ve got a very broad perspective of what challenges our clients and and the industry are facing across the board.
These typically stem back to maritime data and intelligence and in particular recent events have certainly highlighted the importance of vessel positioning data that needs to be reliable, it needs to be accurate, frequent, ideally redundant.
You know, we don’t want to be getting that information from a single source.
And the reason why that’s so essential is because that’s the foundation upon which a lot of further calculations processes are then based.
So it may be combined with met ocean data for effective weather routing or optimization purposes that will contribute to emissions reporting and environmental aspects.
And organisations are under a lot of pressure to make decisions quickly, whether it’s to route a vessel around the Cape or to proceed through through the Red Sea. And there’s big implications on those decisions relative to safety of the vessel, of the crew, the performance of the ship, charter party compliance.
And the quality of that initial observation is ultimately what determines the outcome of that situation, whether that decision’s made by the crew or whether it’s made by the Shoresight team.
And a further challenge that we’re spotting, and again, highlighted by what’s going on recently, is actually understanding exactly who our clients are doing business with.
You know, are these specific ships, vessels they should be acquiring or chartering from a sanctions and screening perspective?
Are the organisations themselves, are they sanctioned entities even to the extent of are the individuals behind those organisations or behind the cargo?
Are they involved in nefarious activities?
Because if they are, that could expose our clients to liabilities as a result.
Interesting.
And if businesses aren’t prepared for future global events, how do you think this will impact business?
So COVID-19 taught us the importance of being connected, of being online so as not to lose touch with the crew, with the vessels or even colleagues whilst was working remotely.
And now that that’s more and more in place, our attentions turn towards whether we have sufficient combinations of data sets in place to be able to make effective decisions.
The ultimate aim here is to improve visibility and situational awareness.
And the impact of not having that in place is that we have 20,000 seafarers that are then stuck in the Gulf as as the number was I believe in in March.
We have vessels that aren’t able to operate.
We’ve got disruption to the supply chain.
If we consider the charter party criteria or the charter party terms, there are massive cost implications of this kind of disruption, let alone the safety and security concerns of having ships up in that region.
Now having those data sets in place isn’t going to remove that risk entirely, but it will certainly help to mitigate against it.
And how do you think companies should try to bridge the digitalisation gap?
So an overnight nought to 100 adoption of digitalisation.
I think it’s an unrealistic expectation to set, particularly in an industry that’s not typically at the forefront of immediately implementing new technology.
But being averse to these kind of changes, somewhat hesitant in our approach isn’t necessarily a bad thing when safety when risk to life is so commonplace throughout daily operations of the industry to bridge the gap.
I’m a modular approach is very, very effective from what we’ve seen.
So this allows the step by step evolution of processes for an organization to adapt to what’s available.
It allows time for the crew for the shoreside team to receive adequate training so that they can make the most value out of the new solution that they’ve got.
And digitalization, of course, moves far more quickly than regulations can keep up with.
So that step by step approach also gives time to make sure that new technology is being implemented in a responsible manner.
And I’ll add also the the integration often helps clients with improving familiarity with with new technologies.
And finally, how can Pole Star global support this considering the need for clarity and precision at sea?
OK, so the initial way we would assist are an improvements to efficiency.
So often we see organisations with a multitude of siloed solutions in place each each department may have their own platform for their own purpose.
This results in a multitude of logins that they then got to access.
There could be contradictory information across the platforms, little to no interconnectivity between them and potentially duplication of services as a result.
Our approach however, is to bring together all the relevant data and metrics into one scalable platform for better assessment, anomaly detection, real time event notification and to allow them to make sense out of the vast amounts of data that are being produced each day.
The knock on impact of that and the positive impression that that leaves is improvements to automation and scalability.
It allows us to complete plausibility checks on the information that’s submitted.
It allows us to ensure that that data is being pushed across to other solutions that may benefit from it.
And it also allows us to then apply this value and this advantage to multiple vessels in the fleet.
Digitalisation powers transparency, whether that’s for transparent emissions reporting, whether it’s for performance monitoring, whether it’s for the weather, routing and optimisation side of things.
And our role at Polestar Global is to provide the maritime intelligence layer that underpins all of those decisions and allows our clients to make more effective, more justified decisions more quickly.
Thank you so much for your time and insights today.
All the best for the rest of Posidonia.
Thank you very much.