ABB finalized the acquisition on June 3rd, 2024, entering into agreement with global data, analytics and technology group DTN to acquire the shipping business of DTN Europe BV, in the Netherlands, and DTN Philippines Inc.
Continuing ABB’s investment in marine digitalization to serve the efficiency and decarbonization needs of ship owners and operators, the business adds approximately 85 specialized staff and new areas of expertise to ABB’s digital offering for the maritime industries.
Weather routing is invaluable if you want to establish a prognosis for how the vessel is going to perform one hour or one day ahead, not only to avoid bad weather but also to use wind speed and direction, and currents, to the advantage of ship performance.
To be clear, ABB has not purchased a meteorology business, and it will continue to buy weather data from third parties including DTN to support the needs of its shipping clients’ geographical operating profiles.
Rather, it has acquired weather routing advisory services which continuously update to the conditions ahead of a ship change, to add a new dimension to its relationships with its ship owning and operating clients. The deal includes the vessel and weather monitoring application programming interfaces (APIs) previously developed by DTN, as well as the algorithms used to determine how weather will impact a voyage.
“Weather routing is invaluable if you want to establish a prognosis for how the vessel is going to perform one hour or one day ahead, not only to avoid bad weather but also to use wind speed and direction, and currents, to the advantage of ship performance,” observes Osku Kälkäjä, Head of Digital Business, ABB Marine & Ports.
Instead of an in-principle but hard to pin down positive, the available gains for voyage efficiency add up to “fuel savings of 5-10 percent”, he says.
Routing Services & ABB Ability™
Post acquisition, all products have been rebranded to reflect their inclusion in ABB Ability™ portfolio for marine, part of the portfolio of solutions ABB offers to a shipping industry that is increasingly reliant on digitalization for efficiency and decarbonization gains. The acquired portfolio forms ABB Marine & Ports’ Routing Services, with solutions called ABB Ability™ SPOS - Ship Performance Optimization System, ABB Ability™ Routeguard - Onshore routing service and ABB Ability™ Fleetguard – vessel and weather monitoring.
Heading ABB Marine & Ports’ service business strategy and development until February 2024, Tomas Arhippainen led the team overseeing the acquisition of DTN shipping business. Now, as SVP, Global Business Line Manager, Marine Service and Digital, Arhippainen is taking responsibility for its integration into ABB.
“We had long experience as a user and through our product development work with DTN on SPOS Seakeeping, and they had a portfolio we could plug into our digital offering to bring a bigger scope,” Arhippainen explains. “It was a successful, fully scale-up business in its own right, staffed with experienced innovators: it ticked all the boxes.”
In big picture terms, Kälkäjä also portrays purchasing DTN Shipping business as a milestone for ABB. Until now, for over more than a decade, the division’s digital path has been defined by expertise in vessel systems, service and support, as well as evolving IT competencies, and has now taken a major step forward.
ABB initially leveraged its installed base to evolve predictive and remote maintenance services, with 24/7 support provided to around 6,600 vessels by a network of collaborative operations centers ashore.
Building on cumulative experience of fleet tracking, data acquisition and advisory software, the company subsequently turned towards sharing its optimization capabilities, unfolding a new ABB Ability™ digital services offering over the same period.
Leveraging synergies
ABB’s collaboration with DTN to develop SPOS Seakeeping, for example, added significant power to the capabilities of ABB Ability™ OCTOPUS – Marine Advisory System software that is widely used by heavylift ship operators. Integrating wave measurements, weather forecasts, navigation information, ship characteristics, loading conditions and motion sensor measurements, SPOS Seakeeping has significantly enhanced the voyage planning capabilities available using OCTOPUS.
The ability of SPOS Seakeeping to account for individual vessel responses, resonances and stresses has clear potential for wider use, says Kälkäjä, noting the impression OCTOPUS has already made on container ship owners seeking to avoid losing more containers over the side.
Meeting the weather routing needs for ship owners signed up to ABB’s new weather routing business will open channels of communication for using existing APIs with other ABB products and services which aim to enhance efficiency and advance decarbonization.
Approximately half of the former DTN employees who are now joining ABB are based in the Philippines and the other half in the Netherlands. While weather routing will doubtless benefit from the support of the 26 countries where ABB Marine & Ports is directly represented, the Philippines has previously not been among them. In this case, therefore, the former DTN Shipping business provides a platform in-country to growing ABB’s other marine products and service business, while in the Netherlands the company has already an established business and organization.
However, both Kälkäjä and Arhippainen recognize more than short term business opportunities in the ABB Marine & Ports’ strategic move into weather routing.
Kälkäjä sees it as an advance in a quest for “The Holy Grail” of just in time vessel arrivals, where voyages are planned for optimized ship speeds and fuel use, and the minimized emissions possible when needless waiting time at the berth is avoided. “Integrating weather routing services brings that possibility one step closer,” he says.
Arhippainen describes it as a steppingstone towards integrated voyage planning that can bring greater transparency and better practice to the maritime world more immediately.
“Today, there is no speed optimization for the sea leg,” he says. “An operator can of course slow down and arrive just in time, but the reality is that vessel speeds are pre-determined and ships wait on arrival – sometimes up to 2-3 days. The point is that there is a lot of inefficiency in today’s marine market and ABB is now in a better position to offer change.”
Working with OVERSEA
The DTN Shipping business will complement ABB’s interest in OVERSEA – a cooperation combining ABB Ability™ Genix Industrial Analytics and technical support with Wallenius Marine ship management expertise to offer digital and remote operational assistance from Fleet Support Centers to all-comers.
While OVERSEA will focus on supporting operational strategies for route selection, emissions reduction and maintenance efficiency, “the DTN Shipping business will provide customers with a weather routing service”, comments Arhippainen.
In an industry hungry for the gains of digitalization, Kälkäjä presents OVERSEA as a means to centralize expertise and optimize use of available resources. “And the ‘human in the loop’ approach we are developing in OVERSEA to help crew respond to biofouling, engine monitoring, emissions or whatever has also shown us just how pivotal weather routing is to vessel efficiency, safety and overall voyage performance.”
In fact, Kälkäjä portrays the addition of weather routing to ABB’s digital portfolio as a “next step” for fleet support as a service which also reframes the relationship with owners.
“Weather routing puts us in the center of day-to-day ship and fleet management decisions, where accurate and timely information is critical for safety, but also the fuel consumption that is decisive in performance against charter terms. We become a 24/7 service provider of the digital weather routing services on which owners increasingly rely.”
Arhippainen emphasizes that weather routing is complementary to other analytics products and services that ABB Marine & Ports has already developed to help owners face up to EEXI, the IMO’s Carbon Intensity Indicator (CII) and even emissions trading.
“Knowing the safe route won't save you anything but adding that information to the other data creates significant opportunities for voyage optimization and speed advisory services that can have a big impact on fuel consumption and decarbonization,” he says.
Other synergies will also follow, as the newly named Routing Services business is integrated into the wider ABB marine digital portfolio.
The former DTN Shipping business is well known within ABB, and both the newcomers and the existing ABB team will have ideas about the opportunities for beneficial integration between weather routing services and ABB’s wider marine digital portfolio, says Arhippainen.
Certainly, the safety case behind weather routing significantly strengthens ABB’s hand in the cargo segment, according to Kälkäjä.
