MAIN HEAD Norwegians get their satcoms together DECK HEAD Wilh. Wilhemsen, Leif Höegh, Odfell, IUM Shipmanagement, Iver Ships, Norwegian Shipowners' Association, DNV Software, Nera, Telenor, Xantic and Microsoft are all working together on shipping IT projects under the Marinet umbrella BODY Here at Digital Ship, we have seen many different maritime data integration projects during our two year history. Many individual companies embark on their own data integration projects but the results are useless because they can't persuade any other companies to join up to their system, unless they have a particularly powerful position in the food chain. There have been several government-funded maritime data integration projects, particularly by the European Union, but too often they seem to be too far from commercial reality, inventing schemes which sound good but which no company would ever use, developed by consultants who are more interested in the fees than the usefulness of their work and have no interest in making their work easy to understand and accessible to others for fear that they would get shown up. So the Marinet research project comes to us with particular interest. It involves a broad cross section of the maritime technology industry, with shipping companies and Microsoft sitting down in the same room together, with each party funding its own contribution to the project and so very interested in coming up with useful results. At a recent meeting, Eyvind Klewe, manager of information services with shipping company Iver Ships, said that the maritime industry would have benefits in making group decisions, particularly with so many complex decisions to be made coming up on the horizon. "It's a form of security," he said. SUBHEAD About the project The total investment in the project over the year has been some NOK 8m (USD 1.1m), of which NOK 1.6m (USD 220,000) was put up by the Norwegian Shipowners Association. The money is not directly put into a big pot however; it is contributed in the form of employee's time. Programmers from all of the companies involved have been sitting down together to put together demonstrator projects to show how specific problems experienced by shipping companies could be solved. Explicitly put, the objectives of the project are to provide knowledge on information and communications technology, to develop guidelines for developing maritime internet services, to test prototype systems and implement them onboard ships. More specifically, the idea is that the shipowners will come up with real business scenarios where technology might be able to add value, setting challenges to the technology service providers, who will try to develop solutions. ""Our goal is to get the industry going in the right direction," said DNV Software's project manager Bjørn Berger. "Shipowners need to make some decisions. But in this project we can set the agenda together." The project, initially scheduled to run only for 12 months January to December 2002, has so far built two "demonstrator" systems, one showing how all the data for a specific logistics chain could be gathered onto a single system and shared between all the parties who need it, and the other showing how parties involved in a ship dry docking can all work together and share data, including the ship itself. Building a workflow management tool for a shipping dry dock involves a limited number of players in a limited environment, whilst building a tool to gather and share data associated with logistics involves many different players, none of whom are known to a single individual, so the possibilities make the project much more complex. The tools are not complete software programs, but serve as demonstrations of how the software could be developed. They were developed by literally putting five programmers from different companies in a room together to find solutions to specific problems defined by the shipping companies. A laboratory has also been set up at DNV with a Fleet 77 satellite terminal, so that applications can be tested on it. While funding has only been agreed so far until the end of 2002, the partners involved hope that they can continue the work, possibly as a more loosely knit community, and whatever happens it is going to try to keep the relations between the different parties going. "We want to set the agenda for more efficient use of ICT in the maritime industry," he says. "We are very much focussing on cutting costs and making this more efficient more owners." Whilst the project has a strong Norwegian focus to date, Mr Berger hopes that this can be broadened. SUBHEAD Docking The docking scenario is an extremely interesting one, as a web-based workflow management tool for managing the inspections and communications involved with drydocking, including the ship, the office, the class society, the dry dock and the suppliers. The tool starts when somebody decides that a vessel needs drydocking and includes generation of the draft specification, looking at the inspections which need to be made, making proposals to shipyards, and following everything up. The ship-shore communications element is currently managed through batched data exchange as e-mail attachments sent using Xantic's AMOS software, although this would be a major application for Inmarsat Fleet in allowing the ship to see directly into the same system as the people on shore. Whilst the dry docking is normally managed by the shipping company superintendent, other players involve include the ship captain, the class society, the shipyard and the supplier. Developing a workflow management tool in itself is nothing special. But what is much more special is the fact that this is the first experiment with bringing these specific partners together online. Very innovative is the integrating of the ship and a shore on a workflow management tool. A great deal of the information required to plan a dry docking, to minimise the time the ship must be kept out of action, will probably only be on the ship itself. So wouldn't it be so much more efficient if shipboard staff can be directly involved in the planning, rather than having the class society sending requests for information to the shipping company which then sends an e-mail back to the ship and so on, a process which could take several days. "We believe that there are a lot of business advantages to be gained from doing this on the web," comments Mr Berger. SUBHEAD The logistics demonstrator A web based prototype system has been developed to track a freight order through its journey, using as example a tractor being purchased in Germany from a US manufacturer. Although there are of course millions of logistics workflow management software tools on the market, but nearly all of them are geared around one specific logistics company customer. The special thing about this one is that it is planned from the outset as a means of allowing several different companies to share data on a platform none of them own or control outright. SUBHEAD DNV Software Class societies so far have been notoriously poor at integrating their own software and online systems with the systems of shipping companies and suppliers; but this initiative from DNV Software is a clear way forward, showing how DNV can incorporate its own class inspections and reports associated with dry docking with a shipping company's system. "DNV's software goal is to provide solutions which facilitate and capture and re-use information throughout the life cycle," says Elling Rishoff, MD, DNV Software. It wants to integrate live class data into the work process, enabling machine to machine communication, for all the processes maritime companies are involved with, including ship design, procurement, plan production, construction, risk management, training, crewing, ship operation, maintenance and spare parts, classification. It wants to will enable digital document exchange between shipyards, suppliers, designers and the class society, with automatic submitting of drawings, calculations and certificates directly into DNV's processes, with graphic models being streamed over the internet, communicating vessel status with partners, including coatings type, compartment types, plate thickness. DNV Software also wants to set up benchmarking services, enabling shipping companies to see how the performance of their individual ships compares with shipping company fleet averages BOX TEXT A Marinet seminar was held in June 2002 at Wilh. Wilhelmsen headquarters at Lysaker, Oslo. Conference presentations and a report can be downloaded free of charge at http://www.dnv.com/software/news/archive/00037/agenda.htm