Integrating emissions reporting into digital work streams

Motorship: Good morning, Paul. And thank you very much for agreeing to speak to The Motorship. I was wondering if we could talk a little bit about ABS Wavesight and your role at the organisation.

Paul Sells: ABS Wavesight is a new software company that was launched in December as an affiliated company of the American Bureau of Shipping (ABS). We are responsible for the development, maintenance and sale of software products in the maritime technology space, and work very closely with our colleagues at ABS to maintain the level of service that we expect.

ABS Wavesight is the product organisation established by American Bureau of Shipping in late 2022. We are responsible currently for what was ABS’s portfolio of software products, which include fleet management systems as well as operational tools. Our fleet management system is Nautical Systems, which is a leader in the segment, has been in the market for almost 30 years. The software offers capabilities that support the commercial business that’s conducted on ships while in service, ranging from maintenance and purchasing to crewing and payroll and many things in between.

We also offer My Digital Fleet™, which is a true data platform and helps monitor the operational characteristics of a fleet, including the voyages that the fleet undertakes to ensure that vessel performance is optimal. This includes data from onboard the vessel and third-party data sources. Our final product is electronic logbooks to help digitise much of the fundamental activities on board the ship.

MS: These are areas where there have been quite rapid developments. One area where we’re seeing particularly fast changes is around the decarbonisation and sustainability space. Could you touch on how you plan to help your customers meet their sustainability goals?

It’s actually a topic that we touch upon in all of our products, but it’s certainly highlighted in My Digital Fleet. My Digital Fleet brings information in from the vessels, third party providers and the enterprise systems to measure and manage a ship or fleet’s consumption and emissions.

For an organisation that’s considering its decarbonisation sustainability goals, it introduces a consistent approach to measure those emissions in an enterprise system. That’s the way the tool is set up. It’s to help provide real time insights into how the vessel is performing.

This allows the ramifications from a CII perspective or in terms of the total carbon emissions of the vessel for example, for a given choice, voyage or maintenance availability. We like to think of it as digitalisation as the path and decarbonisation as the destination.

Looking forward, regulation and technological availability are driving a lot of this. The CII came online this year and the ETS comes online next year in the EU. More broadly, the increased access to high bandwidth, low latency information on vessels is changing faster. We’re working hard to solve the problems of today. But we’re also keeping an eye on those trends, the regulatory trends and the technology trends that will enable solutions today to become the solutions of tomorrow.

MS: Are there any other specific aspects around digitalization, which are contributing to the change?

The broad access to more information and the needs of organisations to become more efficient and competitive with the information that they already control are drivers. Human factors also play a part: employees have expectations about the tools that they use day to day to do their jobs.

MS: You’ve already touched on the upcoming introduction of the ETS scheme from Q2 2024. And this is just part of what we expect to see a greater demand for higher frequency reporting of environmental emissions. Do you expect this to affect demand for your products?

I don’t have any special insight into the future evolution of regulations, but as a market force, we expect the level of reporting that is necessary for gauging whether a ship is maintaining sustainable operations to increase. Based on our experience with other industries, we can expect that regulations are not a fixed set of requirements and will be adjusted following their introduction.

[This is particularly the case with] things like the ETS… [which] will have dollar signs, or euros as it were, attached to submissions. The scrutiny which the measurements will be required to undergo for compliance… will only increase.

MS: How can shipowners and operators ensure that their submissions are compliant once the ETS is extended to shipping next year?

The best advice I could offer would be to start getting organised early. Ask yourself, honestly, whether this is something you want your organisation to do manually or to do ad hoc? Or do I want it to be a continuous part of the way I do business.

The majority of owners that I speak with are leaning towards the latter, where they want to make it part of their enterprise system of records. It’s not really something that most forward-looking ship owners that we speak with are delegating to one person. Instead, they’re looking at it from a systems approach.

MS: You also mentioned that CII is an area that you’re also focused on this year. Just looking ahead, what strategic advice are you offering customers about the phasing of investments in emissions reduction technologies?

From a broad perspective, we expect the largest reductions in emissions in the shipping sector will come from alternative fuels and electrification segment. However, these changes will also be the slowest and most capital intensive. The track of least resistance is the adjustment of operations while at sea using weather, navigational and vessel performance data. And this is what you can do with software, with Wavesight software. You can improve the efficiency of the vessel through real time monitoring, leveraging techniques not only pioneered within maritime, but pioneered in the IoT space, looking at the systems on board as well as routing.

We typically advise our customers to prioritise the less expensive measures, and to start understanding how your business operates. To do that, you must start with measurement. And you do that with software.

MS: We’re seeing ABS Wavesight announce a slew of partnerships. How important are these partnerships in driving this decarbonisation initiative?

It takes partnerships to solve such a big problem. Whether that is partnership with a data provider or a partnership with a cybersecurity provider, we’re interested in partnerships with organisations that support the same sort of outcomes we’re looking for. It’s sort of part and parcel to how we do business – that we want to win together. In fact, we actually partner with some folks that we compete with on other products.

But the short answer to your question is, it’s going to take a lot of people to solve the challenges that the industry faces, and not one organisation is going to be able to do everything all by itself.

This means we have to be able to work together. Systems need to be able to talk to each other, they need to be able to provide data to sources that they weren’t originally designed for, and they need to be able to do it freely and openly. And that’s a major tenant of our product philosophy as we continue to enhance our products going forward.

MS: Looking at some of the other upcoming changes in the industry, I think the digitalisation side of things… is going to become a very interesting area. How do you see the market changing over the next two to three, four years?

It’s an interesting question that is hard to answer for a product organisation. But I will say, we’re very, very focused on our infrastructure on levelling up the products that are in our portfolio. Since we launched in December, we have grown the company by almost 50%. We’re onboarding technologists, product managers, software engineers, architects, etc. that are coming in from not just the maritime industry, but outside of the maritime industry.

Beyond our current portfolio, we’re looking at ways to collaborate with our partners – whether that be a joint exploratory or research project, as well as our own development and how we can generate more information on the condition of a vessel. Some of this is work that we’re carrying out on our own infrastructure, some will be a collaborative effort with the partners with whom we are aligning ourselves.