The maritime industry is now saturated with data, but more information has not necessarily made decisions easier. In many cases, the challenge lies not in access, but in interpretation and usability. This insight explores how data overload is affecting operational clarity.
Panagiotis Mouameletzis, IT Manager at Almi Marine Management SA, explains this, “there are many regulations, but there are no straightforward answers to what should be done and how. So each one of us is trying to understand the regulations to translate them and apply them in the best possible way”.
This highlights how regulatory complexity shifts efforts from execution to interpretation, which demands greater managerial attention. Decisions which used to be made separately now affect more than before.
For example, a routing choice is no longer simply about finding the best route, because it can simultaneously affect schedule reliability, fuel use, and emissions exposure.
Speed selection is no longer an operational decision because it influences cost, compliance risk, and commercial outcomes. As more of these factors come together, decision-making becomes more difficult, and systems designed to optimise a single variable usually struggle when asked to support trade-offs across multiple variables simultaneously.
The industry now has more data than it can use effectively. There are strong tools paired with solid user know-how, but it remains difficult to make these systems work effectively in these organisations.
More data does not automatically mean better data. Jeet Banerjee, a sustainability and emissions data specialist with experience across auditing and ship management, provided an insight into what emissions reporting looks like in practice, stating, “the data that we are getting, I’ll be honest with you, we cannot call it reliable.”
“These data sets are manually fed and the data that we are seeing, even in terms of reporting, is not 100% accurate. It can never be accurate as long as you are not fixing up the parent source.”
Translating greater access to data into efficient decision-making behaviour and repeatable processes is often the most difficult part for companies. In many organisations, data is plentiful, but guidance on how to utilise it is lacking.
Leaders do not necessarily understand what good data usage looks like until they have experienced what better data and better integration can enable.
Download “The Great Integration: How connected maritime technology is unlocking compounded value across performance, compliance, and operations”, and discover how shipping companies can move from fragmented systems to more connected, decision-ready operations.
