The importance of ship monitoring
Ships often burn millions of dollars in fuel. As a charterer or a shipowner, you like your vessels to sail efficiently, consuming the least amount of fuel possible while arriving on time. Your company expects the ships to return value to your business for many years to come, and your management is looking to make informed decisions on optimizing fuel efficiency and reducing emissions for the whole fleet of vessels. Ship monitoring can help you achieve your business goals while reducing emissions.
A new approach to ship monitoring
Imagine you are a performance manager at a charterer or a ship owner. You may look at a fleet of 5, 10, or hundreds of ships.
Your only understanding of ship performance is a single set of data points that are collected manually at sea and reported back to you once per day: the noon report. Many performance managers know the limitations of noon report-based ship monitoring:
- It’s not real-time: you only get average ship performance values over the last 24 hours;
- It does not allow you to correct ship performance data for weather conditions; and finally:
- Noon data is often wrong, as data reported is aimed to avoid claims instead of reporting actual vessel performance.
Basing ship performance on manual noon reporting puts your business at risk for financial loss and reduced profitability. Charter agreements are breached because no one has simple tools to gain real-time insight into actual ship performance during a voyage. Yet noon reporting is still the standard in the ship performance industry. Also read our blog on this subject.
We4Sea offers solutions to remotely measure, manage and report on ship performance, whether they are owned, chartered, or operated by you – in real-time, without investing in onboard monitoring equipment.
Using an in-house developed Digital Twin concept, we have developed a new way of ship performance monitoring.
The benefits of using a Digital Twin for ship performance monitoring
This Digital Twin approach provides several of benefits for ship performance monitoring:
- No Capital Expenditures (CAPEX): You do not need to install any hardware onboard to start the ship monitoring. The solution collects large amounts of data, originating from satellites, AIS, weather stations, and combines it with a model, the so-called Digital Twin.
- Fast: only a vessel name and IMO number is needed to start tracking the performance of a ship. There is no need for a port visit to start, and you can start tracking within hours.
- Weather impact: We report on the weather impact, enabling you to benchmark your fleet of vessels. This is unique in the maritime market.