Shipnet’s Niall Jack discusses Helix

David Stevenson, editor of The Motorship: My name’s David Stevenson and welcome to another edition of the Motorship podcast. Today we have Neil Jack, who is a director, product development at Shipnet, which is a maritime software company. So Niall, thank you very much for joining us.

Niall Jack, director product development at Shipnet:Nice to be here, David. Good to see you again.

MS: Can you give me a brief overview of what Helix is please?

NJ: So Helix is, I think in a nutshell the best way to describe it is a digital twin of your shipping business. So shipnet, we provide ERP systems to maritime along with a handful of others in the market. But what Helix does for us and for our customers is it separates out the the operational layer here day-to-day work in an ERP and then the business intelligence layer, which more and more we see focus coming on you know how can we improve your business and that at its core is.

What Helix is really about?

MS: I’ve done a little bit of research into this and I understand that in some way it it deals with regulation and it’s quite high end. Can you give me a little insight on how to how that works, Neil, please.

NJ: regulations that we expect we will have to comply with in the future. So the question for us really is and for our customers is what is coming next. So we know the trends, the fuel, EU various kind of emissions tracking monitoring.

Programmes that are coming into force, but how exactly will compliance look like that that is still a bit of an open question. The way that Helix works, because we replicate all of your data, we know everything that your your shipping company does.

We can provide a kind of a blank playing field if you like, so no matter what comes around the corner, Helix can give you the data you need in the format you need it to comply with those regulations. 

MS: And just due to see the ship operator has to manually give that data to a regulator or can Helix help in that regard as well?

NJ: It totally depends. Totally depends so Helix itself is a completely cloud based tool, so things like an event, end integrations super easy on the Helix platform versus more traditional types of software. But again you know a lot of these regulation pieces, it’s really reporting and not much else. So the key point is getting the data in the right format in the right place and to the right people.

That is 10 times easier on a platform like Helix than it is in kind of traditional.

Software where you generate a report, then send it manually or you know when you have to engage the services of a third party outside your ERP solution to comply with something that is mandatory.

MS: And I imagine the Helix actually use various data points to comply with regulation in terms of some of the data Helix can use or store. I heard it can use weather data as well. Is that can you tell me a little bit about that?

NJ: Yeah. So, Helix at its absolute core takes everything that you input to our ERP solutions. So that is every procurement transaction, all operational safety data, all commercial data that you put into the system as part of your day-to-day use of ship net. But most importantly, I think and really usefully for customers that we see using Helix, you can enrich that with third party data. So as you say, whether data is a really good example.

Traditionally, when people take things like their operational data and they want to analyse it alongside something else, it becomes a convoluted process.

We have to go to a specialist, they’ll provide some analysis and and really a consulting service and you know we like to call these integrations in this in, in the sector here, but it’s not, it’s really kind of third party services that we believe that just by providing the raw data to the real subject matter experts that is the people sitting in those shipping companies, they can leverage their own tools and expertise to perform.

Rudimentary or in some cases advanced analytics on this data so you know how does whether affect the accident rates on board your vessels.

How can we analyse that to then impact or safety management system? How can we genuinely build a better safety culture? All of these things are quite hard for any external party to do, but if we can give you all that data, you know the health and safety experts at that company can can draw those insights. It goes further and further. I mean vessel performance is A is a really good example as well.

It’s a very high value service to shipping companies and if you can optimise your routes based on whether that you’ve experienced over the last 10 years or what you’re predicting or how your vessel performs in that weather.

High value service. But if you just have access to raw weather data historical you have access to your past void records. So how did my vessel perform in winter in the Baltic Sea in the last 10 years? You can start to just just optimise your day-to-day processes so the next time you’re fixing a voyage between two ports that you know the weather’s bad. You know in November, December, January.

You know that this will take a little bit longer. Helix gives you the data to kind of back that up feeling up with a bit of truth and you know we all talk about data-driven decisions.

Helix, let’s everyone do that, which is really interesting.

MS: The firm’s got a few products, hasn’t it? One of them is it is it one which and how does that fit in with Helix? I mean does the company use the software use APIs and things like that?

NJ: Yep.. Absolutely. So, shipment, the kind of suite of products we, have now it’s a bit of a spider’s web, but the easiest way to think about it is is ship net. One is our core ERP. So if you’re a shipping company and you want to digitise everything that you do ship net one is the is the suite of products for you. So so that that can cover every operational area of your shipping company.

To complement that, we have a suite of web-based tools that can have provide more niche or more specialised services, but allow us to leverage kind of new technology.

To really deliver value. So that’s we have a dry docking management suite.

Documents SE, which is a really a really interesting.

Document management system that I’ll talk about in a in a bit. If you let me and then on top of that, we have Helix, which is our kind of this business intelligence layer that pools all of this data together and gives it to our users in a really manageable format.

It’s an interesting problem that I’ve seen through my own career. It’s difficult to get data and that shouldn’t be a problem.

We talk about AI, we talk about machine learning, but nine times out of 10, we find data engineering is the problem. You know, getting the data to the people that need it is, is almost always the problem.

Shipping companies and I would say that general companies in the world like to jump in at the AI end of the you know, the deep end of the swimming pool, but really just building those pipelines, building that structure, you’d be surprised what kind of value you can get from data.

MS: Perhaps you mentioned that some companies might do things a certain way, shipping maybe a little bit old fashioned and needs to be sort of needs companies like Shipnet to bring them into this sort of ERP kind of world that we’re in.

NJ: I mean we see a lot of there’s a huge variety. I think shipping all too often gets described as kind of, you know, this big monolith. But there’s, there’s very much different ends of the spectrum.

I think a better way to describe shipping rather than old fashioned is is risk aware and and that’s it runs through everything that happens in shipping.

You know, there’s a lot of thought goes into how do we deploy our assets, how do we make money? How do we save money and then that that applies to technology as well. There’s really rigorous selection process for almost every solution in maritime and I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

It it’s curious though, as the world changes around shipping people kind of get used to.

You know quick and easy solutions. So the ability to add AI to something is a request. We get all the time.

But people expect it to be fast because they see that Microsoft do it fast, that a lot of providers in other tech spaces do things fast. So for us it’s been quite a transformative couple of years trying to really get shifted to that. That mindset documents AI I mentioned.

Document Management system core to all shipping companies allows you to manage your safety and regulatory documents. You know, we implemented this AI search. You can just ask a natural language question. It’ll pull out all the answers you need. All the references to the raw documents that it got this information and what we see is really, really interesting is you can start to use generative AI to create reports, summaries, digests from information that you’re capturing in Helix anyway.

So gone are the days of kind of manually analysing.

Hundreds of risk, you know, near misses, risk assessments or accident reports. You can now just ask kind of plain English questions of your data and you get really, really good high quality results coming out of that.

MS: Fantastic and just have interest. Is there any new products coming out from shipping that I mean I know you’ve got, you’ve got Helix and you’ve got shipnet one. Is there any other products to compliment the suite perhaps?

NJ: No, absolutely. So as I mentioned, dry docking documents essay, you’re getting a lot of focus for us this year because we really see the potential of AI to enrich those. We are as well not forgetting our core ERP solutions. We’re spending a lot of time sort of modernising the look and feel. So what we’re deploying is is a series of web applications, sort of mobile friendly web applications.

That if you like, spread ship net out, which is a very strange thing to hear, that’s what I mean is, you know, typically with ERP systems like this, it’s maybe installed on two computers in the ship, the 3rd engineer gets given a printed piece of paper with the jobs that he or she needs to complete. Then they go and sit at the chief engineer’s laptop computer and type it all up. That’s what we want to get away from. We want everyone in the shipping company to be using ship Nets.

For quite selfish reasons, I think because the more data that goes in, the better your insights, the better information you can get out at the at the Helix level.

So a huge focus for us is making it easier to get this information in. We’re not finished there. We’ve got a bit of a focus on our commercial products or voyage management suite coming up over the next year. We’re doing a lot of work again to kind of focus around insight and feeding back that useful information into day-to-day operations. We’ve a lot of focus as I’m sure that everyone’s aware.

Carbon CO2 fuel transformation, that sort of stuff we want to get as much data as we can.

Flowing in and out of ship, net commercial to help people support decisions they make in that space. So new look and new feel coming in the new year.

MS: Brilliant. And I know that you’ve got some of the biggest shipping companies in the world amongst your client list. I’m not sure you can tell me a bit about those. Thank you so much for your time. That has been absolutely fantastic. And I think our listeners should really enjoy that. So thank you so much for your time and I’ll talk to you soon, hopefully. OK. See you start. Bye bye.

NJ: No problem. It’s good to speak to you,