AWT are at Marintec China 2015 this week as part of the marketing roll out for SmartWatch in Asia with operations set to start in January 2016 in the region.
Speaking to Seatrade Maritime News AWT ceo Haydn Jones explained that unlike the company’s weather routing products which were targeted primarily at charterers and ship operators, SmartWatch was targeted at owners. For this reason Asia was chosen as the first region to roll out the new service given the large concentration of shipowners in the region, particularly in China, Hong Kong. Taiwan and Japan.
Explaining the concept behind the new product Jones said: “SmartWatch is called SmartWatch because we are looking at watching over the performance of a fleet of ships. By performance I mean fuel consumption and how efficient the ship is. And we are looking at an individual ship against the prior year, we are looking at performance of sisterships and the performance of vessels of the same type.”
The new product requires no additional hardware and combines four daily reports from the vessel, totaling around 100MB of data, with AIS positioning and weather related data to gauge the real performance of the vessel.
“I believe AWT is uniquely placed to do this because we can adjust for the weather and the current so we can normalize performance for the fact it had headwind or a stern wind, or an abnormal current and that then gives you a real comparison point of view,” he said.
The service will be based on a monthly subscription paid by owners.
Jones believes owners that can optimize their performance are now benefitting from higher rates than those that run their ships less efficiently. “Particularly what I am starting to see is a two-tier market where efficient optimized ships are able to command a higher day-rate than lower performance ships.”
The system is currently being beta-tested on vessels prior to its operational roll out in January.
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