OceanSMART - Vessel Visibility

VESSEL VISIBILITY

B U S I N E S S I N T E RV I E W

Bryan Phillips, Managing Director at OceanSMART, a new venture within Oceaneering’s Integrity Management and Digital Solutions business, has spent three years of blood, sweat and tears to get the OceanSMART vision off the ground, providing the maritime industry with muchneeded transparency and visibility. We find out more.

Written by Anna McMahon • Produced by Jennifer Davies

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Having worked in the maritime services industry for one of the biggest providers in his role as a c-level executive for 10 years, Bryan made the bold move to leave in March 2017, identifying an opportunity to innovate on traditional methods within the industry and to improve the status quo, focusing on cargo owners.

ryan explains, “It hit me that there was no real interest for a number of parties in the supply chain to improve efficiency. Fundamentally, the more inefficient the cargo movement, the more money people in the supply chain make because they are servicing that vessel and the cargo owner has to pay the price.

What fascinates me is how little the

external world understands about bulk shipping and logistics. If you speak to the general public about it, around 95 per cent would think container ships, but this industry is bigger than that. World trade is a nine trillion-dollar industry, and 90 per cent moves by sea. Of that, 60 per cent moves by bulk shipping, such as oil, mining and agriculture.�

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“essDOCS is a critical partner of ours. with each other. They will be taking som and integrating them into their softwar require a lot of documentation, like the origin, invoices etc, and essDOCS facili

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It was seeing how little control the person moving the cargo has that encouraged Bryan to develop a business plan to take to market, so he decided to raise some finance and build OceanSMART. It took nine months to write the business plan and another 12 months to secure the funding because he wanted to ensure the initial investment allowed him to build a complete ecosystem. Bryan adds, “It took another 15 months to build the initial release of OceanSMART. We wanted to partner with Oceaneering because they are a very respected company with

an existing maritime tech business and customer base. We built OceanSMART around that existing business and they committed quite a significant investment to build the launch version.”

The value proposition of the OceanSMART business is to build transparency around how much waste there is in the bulk logistics industry and to provide cargo owners with real-time visibility of their vessels, their cargos and maritime assets, thus reducing risk, hidden costs and inefficiencies.

Bryan says, “One of the key things we

We share information and ideas me of our OceanSMART features re suite. Trade and trade finance e bill of lading, certificates of itates the whole process digitally”

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Cargo owners can pinpoint where their ships are at the touch of a button do is that we show the customer what they can actually do about the waste. For example, we reviewed one company’s data over a 12-month span, focusing on how much time its ships were in port with cargo on board. What were they doing? When were they working? When were they idle?

The amount of time the ships did nothing equalled the amount of time four ships sat idle for a whole year. We found more than 40 per 8

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“We started fro away from com so we really ha doing. We wen spinning. build money and bui now, launching in one of the m existence of m

Bryan Phillips, Mana

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om scratch and walked mfortable corporate lives, ad to believe in what we were nt through three years of wheel ding business plans, raising ilding Oceansmart. It is exciting g a new start-up business most disruptive years in the mankind�

aging Director at OceanSMART

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cent of the time that the ships were at the port, they were doing nothing.

The total opportunity cost, when factoring loss of revenue, idle time, cost of capital and fuel waste, came to more than $500million. That is just one company.”

The bulk cargo industry itself is the backbone of the world’s economy, but it is huge, opaque and very complex, with many stakeholders involved in the buying and selling of cargos, and cargo owners are at the mercy of the supply chain, relying on middlemen throughout the process.

Bryan outlines the core of the problem as follows:

• A lack of transparency: Where is the vessel/cargo and what is it doing? The information about where it is going and when it will get there is manually added by the crew, who may enter incorrect data, sometimes intentionally.

• Huge duplication of data: The industry is essentially paper-driven with a lack of technology around buying, selling and operations, and billing and revenue sharing mechanisms are not structured to benefit the person moving the cargo.

• Complete lack of information and misinformation: Where there is information, it is closely guarded because it is the competitive advantage of the middlemen.

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“OceanSMART built an ecosy of software an There are thre SaaS (Softwar Service), Optim Resourcing”

T has ystem nd services. ee verticals; re as a mization, and

• The amount of waste: Nobody really knows how much there is and what to do about it. It is accepted as a cost of doing business. Digitalisation exposes the enormity of the problem in order to tackle it.

The industry can benefit from OceanSMART solutions offering complete transparency OceanSMART offers tools and solutions to help make the commercial transaction of the cargo as seamless as possible, having built tech to improve supply chain 13

operations. Bryan explains, “We build tools and solutions that give far more transparency and predictability, that address the hoarding of information and the prevalence of misinformation. This provides cargo owners a lot more control and reduced risk.”

According to Bryan, in order to make the industry a more digital place, you must have buy-in from several key players. He adds, “The biggest is the market maker, the massive companies that are moving the cargos. They would be the driver to change. You also need support from regulatory bodies.

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The industry’s current contracting mechanisms and processes are very archaic and this is one of the biggest impediments to moving the industry forward. The third group are the system integrators, companies like us working in collaboration with others to integrate our products across the board. Collaborating reduces silos and ensures capabilities and values are shared across the supply chain.

All the parties in the supply chain are relevant to the future of the industry and its successful digitisation.”

OceanSMART has partnered with paperless trade technology house,

essDOCS, to further enhance its offering. Bryan says, “essDOCS is a critical partner of ours. We share information and ideas with each other. They will be taking some of our OceanSMART features and integrating them into their software suite. Trade and trade finance require a lot of documentation, like the bill of lading, certificates of origin, invoices etc, and essDOCS facilitates the whole process digitally.”

Forging key partnerships with likeminded individuals is something that has enabled OceanSMART to release a product that demonstrates

value. Bryan explains, “What we released in June is not insignificant as a suite of products. We were fortunate that Oceaneering backed us completely to invest funds over 18 months of development before we released the product. What we released is something that adds a lot of value. Oceaneering’s belief and support of us has been invaluable and has added a lot of credibility to our value proposition, as they are a large, well-respected business that is independent from the industry we are playing in.”

OceanSMART has built an ecosystem of software and

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services. There are three verticals; SaaS (Software as a Service), Optimization, and Resourcing. Each vertical can be used by the customer as a standalone product, or the ecosystem can be used in its entirety.

• SaaS – includes tools that add value to the commercial transaction of the cargo and the agreeing of the contracts, as well as the operational processes of the movement of the cargo. Example products are SMART Analytics, SMART Mobile, SMART Position, SMART Vessel and SMART Vetting.

• Resourcing – designed to provide people with tools, complementing existing functions, to eliminate repetitive and low-value tasks, and improve internal processes. As an example, OceanSMART provides the maritime skills and expertise to validate, monitor and process movements of barges, checking all information is correct and

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“On a personal level, the belief that Bryan and his business partner, Neill Tomlin, have in the OceanSMART proposition is profound, having taken numerous risks to get to where they are today�

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accurate. Example products are OCEAN Demurrage and OCEAN Barge.

• Optimization – the core

Neill Tomlin VP of Product and Business Development

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of exposing the waste. The implementation of datadriven insight to easily identify waste, providing logistics and maritime expertise to work with the customer to help them make efforts to tackle the waste and improve efficiencies, either through operational

improvements or better contracting. OceanSMART’s sophisticated data science tools process offline operational documents in seconds and turn that into structured data.

On a personal level, the belief that Bryan and his business partner, Neill Tomlin, have in the OceanSMART proposition is profound, having taken numerous risks to get to where they are today. Bryan concludes, “We started from scratch and

walked away from comfortable corporate lives, so we really had to believe in what we were doing.

We went through three years of wheel spinning. building business plans, raising money and building Oceansmart. It is exciting now, launching a new start-up business in one of the most disruptive years in the existence of mankind.”

For further information on OceanSMART, visit www.oceansmart.com

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+47.90777379 www.oceansmart.com

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