Tag Archives: ECDIS

So poke me. Do seafarers really need always-on communications at sea?

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In the second part of my interview with Intermanager Secretary General Kuba Szymanski we get off topic. That is to say, beyond Intermanager’s work with VSAT vendors and into an area of arguably greatest interest for maritime satellite providers: crew communications and the use of social media onboard ship.

The latter appears to have the communications industry captivated. Crew are reportedly demanding greater access to the internet and the industry is responding, citing its importance in retention and the risks of ignoring such requests.

The perceived shortage of skilled and qualified crew is driving demand for bandwidth far in excess of that for business use. In doing so, it skews the VSAT demand figures, not least because the kind of applications seafarers would like to use are so bandwidth hungry.

To Kuba this puts the cart and horse in the wrong order. The potential of social media tools is huge and growing, but to use a shortage of seafarers as a driver to growth is to misunderstand the current situation.

“First of all, I don’t think this effect is happening as much as some journalists say and as much as some shipping industry ‘politicians’ claim. People are saying every day that the younger generation will not go to sea. I’m being very honest with you now, but the younger generation has no choice, because there is no other employment at the moment,” he says.

The popularity of cadetships at the UK’s Trinity House is growing year by year, not least because of the introduction of tuition fees but Kuba says across Europe, the realisation that a junior officer can earn £35,000 a year tax free is enough for them to make the leap and if that means no internet access, so be it.

“I’m not very popular for saying things like this. I’m seen as being controversial but this is how I see it,” he says. “I also believe that a lot of youngsters are clever enough to know how to communicate whenever the vessel is in port or near shore, so the periods with no communication might be quite limited depending on the trade they are in.”

The ‘bring your own device’ trend where more youngsters have their own laptops or smartphones means they are increasingly adept at getting online. But he says lack of signal is only half the problem.

Also at issue is that owners are increasingly looking to crew to share the cost burden of crew calling, providing the best possible way to accurately measure demand. “The owners are saying OK, but you need to pay half or a percentage and that immediately shows you that youngsters can do without it. If it is free of charge then everybody uses it, but as soon as you have to pay something, then all of a sudden you find that they can do without it,” he notes.

He mentions a large tanker company which put a lot of resources into free onboard internet for crew use but found the cost so prohibitive that they were forced to put more and more restrictions in place as the price for free access. The result, to coin a phrase is neither public nor convenient.

But Kuba’s iconoclasm doesn’t stop there. The industry needs to understand the simplest of drivers – supply and demand.

“I think it is very important to understand there is no shortage of seafarers,” he states. “There is a surplus of seafarers, even in the LNG sector. Owners are not struggling to get crew and some are asking why should I go the extra mile, they will come to me anyhow.”

That’s a big statement in an industry where ‘shortage of crew’, like ‘high fuel costs’ and ‘too much regulation’ is an article of faith. Is Kuba really saying the industry has all the skilled and competent seafarers it needs? Just as in communications, you get what you pay for, he thinks.

“If you want a good quality crew they are there. If you want the best, well, that’s hard because everybody is after them. If you pay the bottom of the market, that’s what you will get. It’s like having sex and not imagining you might have a child. Owners are getting very cheap crew and expecting to have excellent standards and quality,” he adds.

But as to their expectations, he sees the potential of social media as the glue that can bind seafarers together, and maybe let their would-be employers in on the game too. He contests whether Facebook and Skype are truly household names onboard ship, but says the effect on seafarers is immediate and obvious.

“If you think from the psychological point of view. I might work with you for four months and then there is a chance then I will never work with you again. But we became friends and we want to keep in touch. Facebook is a beautiful solution to that, which is why seafarers use it so much, along with things like CrewToo or MyShip.”

Intermanager is hardly the first industry body to have a Facebook page but he has noted that it gets double the traffic than the official website, primarily from seafarers.

“I was asking myself the question why and the answer is it comes with age. In shipmanagement, you’ve got people my age or older and onboard the vessels you’ve got people my age or younger and to these guys it’s what they grew up with.”

The desire to keep in touch and the availability of the tools to make it happen provides a natural win for an organisation so interested in the crew that make world trade go around.

“The most successful companies realise that Facebook does not have to be an enemy. It should be a tool to tap into seafarers, so listen to them, see how morale is, what is motivating them, to keep a finger on the pulse,” he suggests.

It is that – rather than outfitting the ship with a fat communications pipe and footing the bill – that he believes will make a difference in getting the best crew to work with your company. And as he adds, compared to Inmarsat or VSAT, the investment is far lower.

“Still, when I talk to people, people say Facebook gives you no return on investment. First of all, the investment is minimal; it’s time not money. But what it brings is a lot of traffic, a lot of interesting stuff. It is difficult to measure, but how much would you pay to get to five thousand people on your database, most of whom are potential employees? All I know is you would have to spend a lot of money on advertising to achieve anything similar.”

Smarter shipping means having communications you can rely on

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The opportunity for a conversation with Intermanager Secretary General Kuba Szymanski is not to be missed, but you do have to pick your moment. True, he is to be seen on many a conference platform, but he is equally likely to be en route to another airport and the other side of the world, or even home to his beloved Isle of Man.

My interest for catching up with him was prompted by his having taken part in the recent Satellite 2013 conference in Washington, illustrating a growing interest in communications on behalf of Intermanager members. Some 12 months previously he had given a rather effective dressing down to VSAT providers at the Global VSAT Forum just after MaritimeInsight got going, so I was keen to see what progress he had made in making the process of buying satcoms more transparent.

As always when talking to Kuba, the conversation took in related subjects and included some strong opinions. Nonetheless, this is an organisation that wants to change things, so a straight line is not always the most effective route from A to B.

Intermanager’s interest in satellite communications stems from not just from a desire to shake up the buying process. It is founded on the belief that communications form a vital and undervalued link in the business process as well as in crew welfare.

“Intermanager is always talking about crew and I thought it was time to start walking the talk,” he explains. “We really care about our crew and that means the crew as both a worker and as an employee.”

“What we wanted to bring forward is that communication is also extremely important for the viability of our businesses. Without good communication, without good core connection with vessels we will struggle,” he goes on. As a former fleet General Manager for MOL Tankship, his experience had convinced him that users were not getting what VSAT had promised them.

“For the last few years, we have been, let’s say ‘misled’ and we could not afford that anymore. When we only had Inmarsat everybody knew what the boundaries were, expectations were quite limited but Inmarsat was able to meet these expectations. As soon as VSAT came onboard, expectations have been blown out of proportion by the providers,” he adds.

The biggest problem was the assumption that maritime users made that they would soon be enjoying terrestrial broadband speeds. But his gripe was not that VSAT failed to usher in an era of social media and internet use but that VSAT services failed to do what they said on the tin despite running to big bucks.

“We were told we would get 365 days of connection but they forgot to say there would be no service between Australia and Cape Town. Intermanager said, OK, enough is enough. We can always whinge but this will not improve the situation. So we sat down with GVF and we gave them some very constructive criticism and they were happy to take the feedback.”

Suitably chastened no doubt, GVF got Intermanager involved in its events and brought the organisation together with the providers. Kuba happily admits this was not one way traffic, the managers had to improve their knowledge too.

To be fruitful, this could never be just a question of blaming the VSAT guys, but rather looking for sources of assistance and that meant shipmanagers could help themselves by deciding clearly what they needed.

The organisation commissioned Stark Moore McMillan to undertake a survey to gauge return on investment for shipmanagers, “so we could help our guys to see how much money they have to invest in order to achieve more, what were areas which could benefit most and which might benefit least from good communications” he explains.

In providing a tool to help in decision-making Kuba says managers have moved from ‘an educated guess to an educated management decision’ and he says the vendors have listened and moved too.

“I’m extremely pleased because it shows them we were right! There are cowboys in shipmanagement and the same applies to the VSAT system providers. The name of the game here is listening, so they sat down with us and said OK you tell us what your problems are and we together will try to work out the best possible solutions. That is what I was hoping for three years ago and we are some way to achieving that.”

He agrees there are members who decide they still know better but he says even the switched-on companies need help and advice so the opportunity to work directly with suppliers is welcome.

He says many on the sell-side realised they had to up their game if they wanted to sell to owners bumping along the bottom of a terrible market and for whom the to do list starts with the regulatory must-haves and works down to the nice to have add-ons.

“It’s not only VSAT, some of the bigger providers manage terrestrial communication, GSM, data exchanges so they are able to pull a lot of strings. I didn’t expect some of them to know as much about shipping as they did but I ended talking to one who said ‘what about ECDIS, we’ve got a nice solution for you guys’ and that was the icing on the cake.”

The Intermanager engagement strategy is simple, if demanding: be professional, do your homework, understand what makes a shipmanager tick and what can be done to make their life easier. Without that it’s best not to come to the table.

Isn’t it a problem though, that just as the industry sees light at the end of the tunnel, the broader satellite industry is regarding maritime as a potential pot of gold? The risk is that not just incumbents become more aggressive but that new players steam in and destabilise a market that is just getting back on its feet.

Kuba sees the same trend and a repeat of the original path of VSAT into maritime. Other markets have been already saturated and with revenues from government or land mobile under pressure and aero still emerging, shipping looks like a safe bet.

“A lot of them have a misconception in that they see shipping as the big passenger vessels so it is an eye-opener to discover there are only have 350 of those. That might have put them off but they don’t have many other places to go so suddenly the other 75,000 vessels look very tempting. But just because you can sell one million iPhones doesn’t mean all those ships want or can afford VSAT. Using your iPhone might mean paying $20 dollars a month not $5,000 a month for VSAT,” he says.

The number of commercial aircraft also compares poorly to ships, prompting a revival of interest at the point when potential customer advantage can be gained from better communication.

“Everybody has a vessel, everyone has crew but only very few can provide an excellent communication link with your customers so users now are demanding more. The charterer used to ask the manager or operator where is my vessel, what is the ETA, where should I put my trucks? These days the manager can say ‘don’t ask me, log in and you can see all that information.”

Coming up in Part 2 – why the crew calling trend could be overdone and whether there really is a shortage of seafarers.

Crew retention is the tip of the digital iceberg

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Almost 12 months ago an ambitious project began to take shape. Roger Adamson of Stark Moore Macmillan, Vizada (now Astrium Services) and two of the largest crewing agencies in the world, Philippine Transmarine Carriers and CF Sharp, joined forces to embark on the most comprehensive survey of crew and their attitudes towards and use of communications at sea ever undertaken.

The resulting report has generated considerable interest. But while Adamson says it is encouraging to see so many shipmanagers and operators recognising the operational benefits of improved communications from a crew retention perspective, in this guest blog, he lays out why he believes there is a wider opportunity which comparatively few in the industry are really grasping.

Considering the enduring importance of crew retention it may seem surprising that until last year no organisation had commissioned definitive independent research into the communications requirements and habits of seafarers.

However, when confronted with the logistics of reaching, collecting and analysing the written, paper responses of almost 1,000 officers and ratings, this lack of comprehensive research becomes rather more understandable.

Key to any research project is the quality of the data and the sample. Had we not been working with PTC and CF Sharp which between them send over 47,000 crew each year to over 1,000 vessels in the commercial cargo and passenger sectors, it is unlikely such a survey would have been possible.

It certainly wouldn’t have produced such high quality data and responses. With the total market for satellite based crew communications estimated at approximately 925,000 individuals, our sample represents in the region of 1% of the market – making the dataset both fascinating and statistically significant.

One of the headline results has been that 68% of seafarers now have access to communications whilst at sea either all or most of the time with only 2% reporting that they never have access to communications. However those headline figures mask a wide variance between different sectors. For instance the passengership sector, despite having the highest levels of communications equipment on board, provides the lowest levels of free crew communications of any sector.

In common with the passenger sector, offshore vessels have very high levels of equipment, but neither of these are principally driven by crew communications requirements. For the passenger sector, high-bandwidth communications systems are major revenue generators with the penetration of VSAT extremely high.

Similarly, the offshore sector is well penetrated with VSAT systems as charterer requirements dictate high-bandwidth be available, but in contrast to the passenger sector, offshore vessels offer far better access to free and paid-for communications, most likely a reflection of the scarcity of qualified offshore crew.

Across the sectors 46% of crew are not provided with any form of free communications at all. In the context of crew retention that figure should be raising eyebrows.

As a regular speaker at the Informa Manning & Training conference, where this year I’ve been asked to speak to delegates in Dubrovnik about crew communications, I consistently hear managers and operators wrestling with the issue of crew retention.

I’m repeatedly being told that the expense of training crew means that retaining them offers real dollar savings and competitive advantage. When one considers the noise VSAT has been making over the past several years it is curious that we are still in a situation where almost half of all seafarers have no access to free communications, when the ability to provide them with such would not only assist in their retention, but also offer broader opportunities to ship managers and operators.

I think this is where the real issues lie. Traditionally the expense of satellite communications together with the necessity for robust equipment and reliability in an environment where mission-critical literally equates to life and death, has always meant failure wasn’t an option and experimentation challenging.

As one of the most regulated industries in the world, shipping is about compliance and meeting minimum requirements. In many respects it is a unique industry, but it is not immune from the digital revolution which has swept up every other.

With the IMO advocating an over-arching e-navigation strategy combining ECDIS with new technologies converging across navigation, IT and communications, the landscape of maritime business is changing fast.

The opportunities for forward thinking ship managers and operators are highly significant, but unlocking maritime’s digital promise will require a major shift in thinking. IT, communications and digital technologies have the potential to drive cost savings, service improvements and the all-important crew retention.

In my experience shipmanagers and operators are hungry to understand how and where their businesses can implement and benefit from these changes, but as yet suppliers aren’t creating the cross-businesses value propositions to help them.

By commissioning the Crew Communications 2012 survey Astrium have signaled their intention to address this need. The wealth of information it has provided to shipmanagers and operators about the crew they depend upon is extremely valuable, but it’s only the beginning of what’s required.

Case studies have always been the primary tool in the maritime salesperson’s armoury, but what’s needed now are more independent, in-depth studies and analysis which can inform both suppliers, and ship managers and operators.

The advent of new High Throughput Satellite systems, from Intelsat EPIC to Inmarsat’s GlobalXpress, O3B to Iridium NEXT, means bandwidth and speeds will accelerate further. But without the context of operational implementation and potential cost efficiencies these systems are just adding a new level of complexity for ship managers and operators.

We are approaching an era of real technology convergence in maritime which has the potential to transform the industry for the better. Doing so will require technology suppliers to gain a far more holistic and in-depth understanding of the shipping business. And for ship managers and operators to help them.

A condensed version of the Stark Moore McMillan report, Crew Communications 2012 is available for download from here.

Does shipping have an Aaron Swartz? Maybe it needs one

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This is one of those articles – an obituary in fact – that you read, then re-read with growing attention and which sets you thinking. You think ‘what a waste of a brilliant brain’ but I don’t know enough about him to make judgements about that.

What I wondered was – what would a shipping industry version of this guy look like? Would he get anywhere? Would anyone listen to him?

Has anyone in maritime IT invented anything anything as innovative or useful as RSS? How about ECDIS or S-100? One might say AIS is a neat piece of technology but of course the US Air Force paid for that and shipping got to use it.

Mostly I keep being drawn back to the concluding comment – that people like Aaron develop standards for free that companies take up and use to create profits. Some are winners, some pay the price of their idealism.

Read the Bloomberg Businessweek article here.

Eyes on the future of e-Navigation

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How far we are looking ahead in the maritime industry is a topic I’ve tried to unpack over the last couple of weeks and the results so far have conformed more to short term problem-solving than long term strategic needs.

So it was a matter of good timing that the Economist included an article on eye tracking in its technology quarterly around the same time as the recent DigitalShip Athens event. As the Economist observed, the ability to use neuroscience to track the behaviour of consumers is already providing marketers with invaluable data on how to package and position brands.

But the applications go far beyond how we choose our breakfast cereal. In the US, eye tracking is already being used to alert drivers in danger of falling asleep at the wheel. Disabled people can use it to operate computers and wheelchairs and surgeons can use it as a ‘third hand’ to control robotic equipment. Naturally there are military applications too but typically there was no mention of shipping.

That made the presentation by Dr. Nikitas Nikitakos, Professor, Dept. of Shipping Trade and Transport, University of the Aegean to DS Athens the more timely. Dr Nikitakos’ group is using the principles of neuroscience to study the usability and ergonomics of bridge equipment, in particular to assess how bridge staff would work with the IMO’s e-Navigation programme which promises more screens and machines on the bridge of the future.

Once this might have been a blue-sky technology but the falling cost of equipment makes its application to business and consumer markets increasingly practical.

Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system. Traditionally a branch of biology it has been transformed by the application of computer engineering to cover chemistry, mathematics, linguistics, medicine and applied sciences. And there is plenty to study, since the nervous system is the most complex organ system in body: the brain alone is home to 100m neurons and 100 trn synapses.

At the University of the Aegean, cognitive neuroscience is being used to study the affect of external conditions on the nervous system, such as what attracts the user’s attention, what changes their perception and what activity or processes take place during decision making. One outcome of the research will be to develop interactive technologies that can benefit from cognitive ergonomics. Understanding how the bridge team operates means that the design and position of equipment can be improved.

But Dr Nikitakos says ergonomics is more than just maritime feng shui. It is crucial in managing the health, safety and mental workload of bridge teams and he hopes to produce guidance how to evaluate the optimum installation of equipment on the bridge.

“Cognitive neuroscience employs three means of assessment; experiential verification, operational definition and repetition and uses tools such as eye tracking, MRI, speech sentiment analysis and facial analysis to understand the effect of their environment on the subject,” he explains.

His group focuses mainly on using a specially-designed helmet to track the gaze of a subject’s eyes across bridge equipment as well as employing speech recorders to process voice commands onboard.

Capturing the needs of the user is at the heart of e-Navigation and Dr Nikitakos believes usability will be key to getting personnel to adapt to the new equipment and systems they might be using.

“We are defining usability in terms of ISO standards as the extent to which equipment can be used to achieve specific goals effectively and efficiently. For marine usability, we are focussing tests on evaluating usability of specific products for real users,” he says.

In practice, this means evaluating usability and ergonomic set-up on the bridge for each command position, as well as issues such as the quality of colours used in displays. He thinks equipment manufacturers and bridge designers could use the outputs from the research results to model modes of interactivity and how to assist command functions and improve teamwork while minimising stress.

The research takes a mixed – and practical – approach, assessing inputs such as GPS, ECDIS and steering control and working with maritime academies in simulator situations supplemented by questionnaires and interviews.

The university is also working with a Japanese research team attached to the IMO’s e-Navigation sub-committee which is adding neuroscience to its observations and develop more robust data, examining the differences between cadets and expert users and between nationalities and genders – and  suggesting what may need to be modified to improve usability.

As Dr Nikitakos points out the University of the Aegean is far from the first institution to study how neuroscience can measure behaviour and suggest improvements to usability, but he says his group is the first to consider the this technology in terms of the maritime sector. But presumably there will be more people keeping an eye on it now.

Straight talk and tough love on ECDIS

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I write a monthly column for BIMCO on similar subjects to those covered here. Every now and again I throw all the toys out of my pram and usually encounter a polite refusal to publish. I honestly thought the same thing would happen here but I’m pleased to say BIMCO came through and published the piece.

It’s a serious issue, caught in the crossbeams of some poor regulation, some over-zealous enforcement, tardy preparation and the shipping industry’s persistent obsession with looking the other way. No it’s more than that – it’s like Douglas Adams describes one of my favourite aliens in H2G2: “it believes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you”.

Anyway read on, ‘cos this train is pulling into the station on slightly iffy brakes…

Tough love and straight talk on ECDIS

By Neville Smith

I was as interested as anyone to read last week’s Watchkeeper “Taking ECDIS very seriously” noting real-life incidents reported by pilots where the shipboard Electronic Chart Display and Information System (ECDIS) failed to perform correctly. In fact I was probably more interested than most, having just attended a series of Admiralty workshops on this subject at the biennial Sea-Japan event.

Having received assurances from Watchkeeper that he would not mind my penning a semi-riposte, there are observations to share on the ECDIS mandate process that I think need reinforcing, over and beyond the problems that he points out.

Beginning with the current issue of ECDIS anomalies, while it is clear that this is a serious issue, it is also true that no mariner on any ship should be unaware of them by now, nor that they lack the means to take corrective action.

A briefing from one ECDIS maker stressed the point that when the anomalies were first identified, it had a solution available within months. This is not a software “patch” but an upgrade that served to rectify the problem. The first anomalies were actually identified in 2010, which makes the recent fuss seem a little tardy on behalf of some owners, their flag states and their class societies too. As further issues have come to light these too have been resolved, with new software freely available for download.

While one or two ECDIS manufacturers have been singled out as offenders, there is reason to think that more than one maker shares the issue, which suggests a need for more transparency on this issue is overdue.

Conversations at Sea-Japan appeared to confirm that while many ships are fitted with ECDIS, paper charts remain the choice for primary navigation. This is perfectly legal (and will be after the SOLAS amendments come into force, incidentally) but any computer software that is not kept up to date can hardly be said to be fit for purpose.

It should hardly need saying that owners must keep charts up to date for legal ECDIS-based navigation but in addition free data services are available to ensure that the latest temporary and preliminary notices can be overlaid on ENCs.

The suggestion that some owners may be using pirated software on their ECDIS is simply beyond belief. Would they wittingly buy counterfeit spare parts with the same abandon? Some might perhaps, but ECDIS is too important to let any risk develop that the system is not performing to the required standard.

Neither should ECDIS need a period of bedding in, since it has been available since the mid-1990s. Yes, there is confusion between the unofficial version, ECS and official ECDIS, but there has been plenty of time for the industry to prepare for the change.

Comparisons heard elsewhere to the introduction of AIS, GMDSS and LRIT are spurious. The industry has had a long enough lead time to think about how ECDIS will affect its operations. Some far-sighted owners have used the time to re-shape their procedures and operations to take advantage of efficiencies it can deliver. Others have stuck their heads in the sand.

The level of feedback from earlier Admiralty seminars has been almost jaw-dropping in the basic nature of questions asked and concerns raised. To judge from these, one would not think the first mandatory carriage deadline was just months away.

Of course, for the majority of the existing fleet the deadline is some years away and the current earnings environment hardly encourages the kind of investment in time and money that ECDIS demands. But owners have to understand that moving to digital navigation is not the same as upgrading the Inmarsat. It requires a change of mind-set that many appear to baulk at, because they think it removes or replaces traditional navigation skills and increases risk.

That is a little like saying that this article would have been better written on a typewriter than a PC. Yes, loss of GPS is a risk but ECDIS still functions in DR mode if GPS signal is lost. Yes, navigation must be backed up by manual procedures, but the regulations only require navigators to use ECDIS, not be experts in the computer code that powers it.

Owners also need to understand that ECDIS operations must form part of the company’s safety management system, so the change of mind-set includes both ship and shore and means superintendents, many of whom are engineers, must think like deck officers.

The fact that training is such a big issue now is clearly a result of putting off to next year what should have been started or even completed by now. Hardly a week passes without one dire warning or another on the number of officers who need to be trained by the deadline and yes, the numbers are daunting.

There remain some dubious training institutions whose idea of education is rubber-stamping a certificate as a reward for attending a generic ECDIS training course. Increasingly though, training is improving as centres recognise the fact that attendance means nothing when the PSC inspector asks a navigator to demonstrate their competence.

Neither is computer-based training the panacea that many would like us to believe, since it often takes longer to complete and is less effective, than that which happens in a classroom.

There also needs to be recognition of the fact that when “ECDIS-assisted groundings” have occurred, the resulting investigation rarely, if ever, concludes that the equipment was actually malfunctioning – or that the crew were completely competent and adequately trained. Normally a combination of incorrect configuration and insufficient training are the cause.

If this sounds like an attack on ship owner reticence to engage then that is partially true. More than that, it is a reflection of the fact that owners have failed to grasp the magnitude of the change at hand. But they are not alone. The type approval process is in need of an upgrade, flag and port states need to understand the subject better and it would be a huge help if all equipment manufacturers interpreted the performance standard in the same way, rather than insist on making all system interfaces different.

But even so, the world turns and we will find out within months how prepared or otherwise the industry is for the change of rules. The news – also reported previously by Watchkeeper – that AMSA is treating 1 July 2012 as the effective date for mandatory carriage on all ships, will give us a clearer picture of how prepared or otherwise the industry really is for a change on this scale.

https://www.bimco.org/en/News/2012/04/25_Feature_Week_17.aspx