Marine digitalization just for the sake of it is not a solution – it must result in better operations, believes licensed mariner Krystyna Wojnarowicz, taking on the challenge of moving the maritime industry into the digital age.
“The digital maturity level evolves in every industry, and at this point, maritime is still lagging,” says Wojnarowicz, a trained fast vessel captain and the co-founder of MARSEC, a multimodal transport optimization company that focuses on improving maritime operations through digitalization.
No reason not to
Having navigated an ocean of digitalization projects, Wojnarowicz is largely unsympathetic to the usual list of excuses coming from maritime companies struggling to get out of the gate. “Maritime is not as special an industry as most insiders make it out to be. Even prior to founding MARSEC, in my twenty years of experience, I have dealt with huge companies and massive digitalization programs. Not just in shipping, but adjacent industries too, like aviation, energy, and automotive. We have gone through their digitalization growing pains, and we have a huge bag of lessons learned and pitfalls avoided.”
The first of those is to avoid viewing digitalization as primarily an internal project, rather than a process. “Companies need to treat digitalization as a corporate-wide process improvement program. Most companies are skeptical about internal disruption, but digitalization is being driven from the outside, by market demand. It’s better to bite the bullet and go forward than to find excuses not to.”
In order to take that tough first step, it is important to understand the overall digital readiness of a company. “In-house IT resources cannot do everything,” says Wojnarowicz. “Digitalization is a comprehensive change effort, and it needs the support of a change management program. Does a company have a corporate wide digital improvement program? Who are the champions? Who are the stakeholders? If they are on board, we go forward.”
One of the most common mistakes companies make, Wojnarowicz says, is trying to run the process behind closed doors. “Do not exclude people. Companies need to realize the digitalization is not just implementing an IT strategy. They need to think about all the people impacted by the process, to communicate with everybody in the value chain. A key factor to success is providing seamless information to all parties. It’s about people, people, people.”
Showing the way
“The maritime industry has a conservative reputation, but I really think they are just realistic. When everyone is saying you have to do something it can be intimidating. They all feel they have to go digital, but most companies have one leg here, one leg there, and the pressure on the IT department becomes too high, especially when the in-house digital talent is missing. Companies in Silicon Valley understand this issue and address it adequately. Shipping could learn a lesson here.”
Wojnarowicz believes that easing companies into the digitalization process by showing employees the concrete potential for improvement is the key. This means helping people to do their jobs better, Wojnarowicz says, not threatening jobs. “Some people are understandably skeptical, but if we deliver tools that are easy to use, then we eliminate tedious tasks. People try it out and like it. We give them tools that can help make their lives easier.”
Another success factor is to stay focused on the rewards that digitalization can provide. “Maritime traditionally has a lot of data that is collected but wasted,” Wojnarowicz observes. “Legacy equipment data is typically not correlated with digital systems. We have even seen digital data recorded on paper. Often there is too little focus on creating seamless processes. We go in thinking about how to keep digital data digital.”
Think big, start small
Wojnarowicz refers to a survey conducted by McKinsey in April of 2018, where they found that in businesses running digitalization pilots, less than 30 percent of projects were moving forward. “First of all, there is no proper plan, and no budget. They rush into it thinking, ‘It can’t be that difficult’. Then they discover the pitfalls when they first begin to run pilots, and they get discouraged. Most often this has nothing to do with technology, only with politics in the organization, and this applies to all industries, not just maritime.”
A successful maritime digitalization process typically starts by addressing cost savings, providing tools for analytics of routes, fuel consumption, emissions, and fleet management. “These are the first points of attack. After that is understood, the next level is addressing new products and services that they can offer. Then they can start to monetize their data.
“The main point is not to do digitalization for the sake of digitalization. The result must make the operation faster, cheaper, and better. If a company applies automation to inefficient operations, that will just multiply bad practices. Identify your best practice first, then implement that digitally.”
Wojnarowicz encourages enterprises to think big, but start small. “If the foundation for change is robust, then we try things out for some months and arrive at proof of concept. Then we move on to the pilot phase, and after that we scale it into production. The point is to create a learning organization. Start with a small dedicated process improvement group within your organization. Learn from the experience of others, and make it fit for you. Even though digitalization is urgent, you don’t have to rush.”
