Rapid app development key to LR digital offering

The organisation has teamed up with digital platform and solutions provider QiO to develop a ‘cloud-neutral’ platform – compatible with any operating system – that offers complete data confidentiality (the service providers will have no access to customer data in any form) and ‘edge cloud’ functionality, enabling apps to run on ships without connectivity and synchronise with the cloud-based platform once a connection is restored.

LR will use its historic data – for example on ship defects – to help train algorithms (while not revealing the data itself to users), and has worked with QiO to establish a rapid innovation methodology that allows useful applications to be built quickly and cheaply.

Highlighting the speed at which value could be found using CyberPerform, Maurizio Pilu, vice president of digital innovation, Lloyd’s Register, pointed to a trial with UK ferry operator Red Funnel in the second half of 2016. In 12 weeks the company was able to provide an industrial-strength data platform, log-in portal and dashboards showing fuel consumption and an efficiency index (based on several months of historical voyage data, ship telemetry and wave and weather information).

Lloyd’s Register has also been working with an undisclosed large ship owner to explore how its digital platform can assist the company in developing algorithms for automating ship operations, as part of its strategy of moving towards autonomous vessels. In another case, LR is working with a shipping consortium of small operators to build a shared application that retains data confidentiality for each of the members.

Pilu said: “The elephant in the room is the value of your data, and the sooner you get an answer to that the better. Our innovation methodology is geared to finding that answer in the fastest and lowest cost way possible. Once clients can see the value of data, they can then make decisions on whether to develop the app further, or scale it up across their fleet. This is a very different approach to IT vendors, who will often try to sell big systems from the start.”

Baz Khuti, founder and CEO, QiO, added: “When it comes to finding value from data, speed and cost are critical to success. We’re taking best practices from Silicon Valley and enabling LR to deploy them to solve marine industry problems with its clients. At the same time we are upskilling LR’s workforce to manage those technologies and client relationships itself.”