siliconindia | | July 20188NEED AND IMPORTANCE OFIT IN THE SHIPPING INDUSTRYBy Anjan Deb, GM-IT (CIO), The Great Eastern ShippingQ. Can you talk about the IT trends that are leveraged by your company? A. In comparison with other industries, the shipping industry is running behind in terms of IT usage. If I pick up any bank or any manufacturing industry, they are always much ahead. However, it is slowly picking up. We have 46 ships that are remotely managed from India. On the communication side, the biggest challenge in India is that the Indian Government does not allow you to put VSAT (Very Small Aperture Terminal) onboard, on ground of security related issues. As a result, we have to go for a very limited capacity broadband-based internet connection, which is very difficult to connect, transmit data, videos, online streaming, or real time data.The people managing the ships are actually sitting at shore. They take care of any technical issues or any other operational issues that occur when at sea; continuously monitoring and guiding the ships. They are completely dependent on the feed that comes verbally, through audio from the ships. This is very expensive because it is a satellite connection. To reduce the cost of connectivity, we have introduced VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) allowing us to communicate with the ships from anywhere with just an internet connection. We are trying to get real time data, especially on the operational side. We have implemented IoT by installing many sensors in different equipment onboard, like the main engine, radar, ECDIS (Electronic Chart Display and Information System) an electronic map of the sea; these sensors directly send data to shore. Experimentally, we have put them in four ships and are now getting a lot of real time data which has actually raised the level of efficiency of the people at shore managing ships. They get the data in real time and are not solely depending on the data given by the Captain of the ship, which isn't as reliable. If the experiment is successful, we plan to run it on all our ships. Right now, we have many applications at shore, which actually give the people managing ships, on a day-to-day basis, a lot of data from applications on the ships and in the form of reports, about the ship's performance, engine performance, fuel consumption, etc. The data compiled for all 46 ships provides for a lot of MIS data and dashboard data which helps people manage the ships from shore. The objective is to run the ships efficiently in terms of cost effectiveness and better service to the customer. Those things are now much more data driven, which was earlier not there. We are slowly moving a lot of internet related stuff onboard. People now use the internet for personal reasons and it has now created a huge cyber security threat that is extremely concerning. We have had multiple check-ups by cyber security experts to know our vulnerabilities and Anjan DebIN MYOPINION
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