Contrary to other segments in the maritime industry, the Covid-19 pandemic has been challenging for start-ups and the route towards digitalisation within the offshore market.
For many industries, the pandemic and its subsequent introduction to the now familiar term “remote working”, has somewhat “forcefully” accelerated the need for cloud-based solutions and digitalisation in order to keep employees connected and counteract the fact that most offices are closed down these days.
This has proved to be difficult in the offshore market and, despite the peculiar circumstances we are in, unfortunately we still see a few charterers clinging on to the old traditional way of chartering vessels — through phone calls, emails and numerous excel sheets being sent around between all involved stakeholders.
Before the pandemic, this was taking up far too much time, the risk of sharing confidential information was significant and keeping everything in compliance was a major undertaking. Needless to say, Covid-19 and remote working has further enhanced these challenges.
The first movers in using new technology reacted before the pandemic and it was believed and expected that the remaining few charterers would quickly identify the numerous benefits that comes with everyone being able to work on a common platform irrespective of where and what your current Covid-19 office looks like. However, that has proved to be a slow process.
New way of working
Part of the reason is the considerable effort and time the oil and energy companies have had to devote in order to quickly adapt to a whole new way of working during the pandemic.
It has been a monumental effort and they simply have not had the time nor the capacity to consider new and better ways of working through disruptive technology solutions.
However, we do especially have to applaud the Norwegian charterers. Close to 70% of them are now using our digital chartering portal and we have in fact had record activity in the portal during the pandemic.
We strongly believe it will only be a matter of time before everyone is using a common digital chartering platform as companies have been introduced to technology and digital tools in some way or shape during the pandemic.
The level of digital knowledge is slowly evolving and the inherent scepticism to the use of technology diminishes as users become more and more tech or digital savvy.
