Data Driven Decision Making

Written by

Robert Hansen

The incentive of saving fuel and optimizing journey´s is a make-or-break deal going forward.
On one side regulations will force the industry to reduce emissions for a more sustainable future, on the other, actors will strive to optimize their operations by digital means to save and reduce cost. In the middle you have the customers expecting not to be implicated in the emissions trading costs but also take part of the savings outcome. How do you own your data and make full use of it?

The first rule of becoming data driven is to own your situation. That means you have to be able to rely on and trust your data being produced by your business every day.

Many suppliers will offer a full scope solution from tapping into data streams, collect and process to store and analyze your data with the outcome of suggesting actions.
But what happens when you are looking at adding or changing tools to further enhance your optimization journey? When all that data is locked into a proprietary system that you do not own but utilize as a service?

The suggested approach is to build a system that you control up to the point where you share and distribute relevant data to suppliers looking to analyse and suggest actions for parts of operations bringing all of that outcome to your table for real and effective decision making. That outcome can then also be feed to create models relevant to your business.

From a data driven perspective try and visualize a tower consisting of four levels built by several blocks.

At the bottom level you have the IT-infrastructure. This level is your base. This is where your security, network, software hosting, communication and every day work is taking place. All your digital integrations is tapping into this foundation that you layed out to ensure constant IT availability for your fleet. The system is built to cater for your business today and during it´s full life-time-cycle.

At the second level you have the edge capability, this is where you collect, time stamp, tag and organize your data into harmonized streams of quality data that later can be utilized for analytics. This step requires a good amount of knowledge and experience to set up correctly ensuring that only quality and what you want is going into to the bank. Creating a data lake with any available data from different vendors and systems without altering the streams into a harmonized fleet function instead of a vendor specific data stream, will most likely make you end up in a future pool of abundance where you run the risk of having to start over from scratch. Do the work now and not later and keep adding new data by controlling it from day one.

Level three is storing and availability. Vessel data needs to be available for both individual and fleet analytics. Short time there will be daily decision being made onboard by crew and software presenting options. Long term the fleet will base more and more decisions around business and route planning from data gathered and aggregated. With time there will be greater possibilities of making very sharp and narrow decisions taking in all aspects of the operation. Cloud based availability of data hosted and owned by your company is the key to success here.

Last but not least, the actual digital driver of the decision making. You can build your own, utilize one or several suppliers offering optimization tools or benchmark a few before deciding. The approach of building and controlling all the steps of your data gathering and decision making puts you in control and makes sure you can answer rapidly to your business needs. Most of who have only just begun to see the needs and benefits of data driven decision making.

Need help to build your independent layers of control?