I recently had the opportunity to sit down in London with two of Cargill’s influential leaders, Eric Aboussouan, Cargill Ocean Transportation VP of Strategy, Digitalization and Investments, and Patrick Jourdain, Cargill Ocean Transportation Customer Lead, to discuss the expansion of our long-standing partnership. With goals spanning customer experience, a simplified tech stack, industry collaboration, and more, Cargill’s Ocean Transportation business is preparing to set new benchmarks for efficiency and customer satisfaction across the bulk industry. Read below for a recap of our conversation.
Cargill is now positioned to leverage Veson’s full product portfolio including Data Intelligence solutions and Shipfix. What are the leading factors in expanding the relationship with Veson?
Eric Aboussouan (EA): Around 18 months ago, as part of our digital transformation, we made a strategic decision to simplify our technology ecosystem. This involved partnering with fewer, big strategic partners with specialized expertise, who complement each other and are open to collaborating at an industry level.
This decision was driven by our need to collaborate with partners who share our vision of transforming the maritime industry, are forward-focused, embrace innovation, and can develop robust solutions for scalability. By doing so, we aim to extract more value and have a bigger impact on our business and the industry.
With a shared desire for digital transformation, open collaboration between our teams, and complementary strengths, skills, and focus points, Veson is the perfect partner to expand our relationship with. They have set the standard for digital transformation in the shipping industry, with their IMOS Platform being the leading solution in the market.
Cargill is clearly committed to the energy transition. How is Veson helping you minimize the environmental footprint of your shipping and logistics operation as well as helping you navigate through the complex new IMO and FuelEU regulations?
EA: Yes, Cargill’s commitment to the energy transition is unwavering and we believe that Veson, by unlocking the power of big data, will play a crucial role in helping us minimize our environmental footprint and navigate the new regulations.
With Veson, we have access to a single platform that generates its own proprietary set of data and has supplier data and our own Cargill data that can be integrated into other systems that Cargill operates.
Understanding and reporting on the data is essential and this centralized access to high-quality data, not only enables us to make better and faster decisions but will enable more meaningful reporting to the full ecosystem of industry bodies, customers, head shipowners and bunker providers in relation to the new IMO and FuelEU regulations.
Alongside digitalization and the energy transition, what would you say are the most significant challenges Cargill is facing right now in terms of your global maritime operations and what steps are you taking to manage them?
EA: Alongside digitalization and the energy transition, two of the most significant challenges and potential opportunities Cargill is facing in our global maritime operations are the heightening global macroeconomic environment and the rise of Generative AI (GenAI). The whole shipping industry is on the cusp of shifting from digitalization to GenAI, which promises to be far more transformative and rapid.
To navigate these challenges and ensure we are fit to continue leading the way in the maritime industry, we must adapt, embrace change, and transform. The steps we’re taking to do this are:
- Prioritization and focus on the AI transition: We can’t tackle everything at once without putting our business at risk, so we will prioritize and focus on the choices we make. We are embracing new technologies and simplifying our approach, particularly with GenAI and within our own organization.
- Risk management: Being good at managing risk is crucial in these uncertain times, and we will continue to lean into this strength.
- Building strong external partnerships: Given the complexity and uncertainty of the current environment, we recognize that we can’t do everything on our own. Building strong external partnerships is essential, especially in areas like sustainability and digital/GenAI transformation. These partnerships help us navigate the complexities and uncertainties we face.
Cargill is committed to being a global leader in modernizing the way the industry manages freight. How does your collaboration with Veson reflect this commitment?
EA: To be a leader and drive bold innovations, we need to collaborate and to take risks, and we want to do that with partners who share the same vision, goals and approach. Our partnership with Veson is built on our joint willingness to collaborate, learn from each other, share benefits and take risks.
Patrick Jourdain (PJ): Recognizing the complementarity of our strengths—Veson as a tech expert and Cargill as an industry expert—this collaboration leans into the expertise of each business, together strengthening our ability to solve the inefficiencies experienced by our internal business, our customers and across the entire industry.
Veson shares our vision and goals for this transformation and understands the importance of moving at the right pace and the need for courageous leadership as we use our combined scale to drive innovation, lift industry standards and make a difference across the industry.
Enhancing the client experience is a fundamental tenet of both Cargill and Veson’s business strategies. How does this strengthened relationship advance that objective and impact the industry?
PJ: At Cargill, we pride ourselves on being a customer-centric business. In our daily interactions with our customers, we have recognized that modernizing the experience a freight buyer has with its ocean transportation supplier is a crucial necessity in today’s fast-paced world. For thousands of actors in industrial companies, purchasing freight is one of the many steps needed to move the cargoes that power their supply chains. And to do that in the bulk industry, they largely rely on disconnected systems with emails and one-on-one verbal communications at the center. The many inefficiencies or risks of errors inherent to such a way-of -working present a significant opportunity for transformation.
Our team invested significant time listening to our customers to understand their pain points and identify what they would need to manage their freight procurement workflow in a modern and efficient manner. Our conversations quickly identified that such a solution would only work if it were deployed at scale to our industry, if only because all our customers work with multiple suppliers and brokers. With Veson, we found the perfect partner to translate customers’ use cases into a digital interface supported by modern tech.
Rather than creating a patchwork of solutions, our goal with Veson is to eliminate these inefficiencies and improve the customer experience, much like other industries such as banking, healthcare and retail have done. This partnership allows us to integrate our systems more seamlessly, providing customers a unified platform that enhances visibility, efficiency, and control over their freight procurement processes. This will set new benchmarks for efficiency and customer satisfaction across the bulk industry, and in the process, help attract and retain new talents.
For this to happen, the network effect is crucial, the more participants, the more successful the transformation. This isn’t something we share with the industry out of pure selflessness—it’s a win-win. For the system to really work, we need everyone onboard, including our competition.
What does Cargill consider to be the key drivers of growth and innovation across the global maritime sector over the next decade?
EA: The reality is, over the next decade, trade flows will marginally grow in both dry and oil, and some of those flows will decline. Ship owners and ship operators will have to reinvent themselves.
We anticipate that growth will come from completely new sectors including the convergence of zero carbon shipping and technology. This will require businesses to be more integrated, consolidated and sophisticated, completely embracing new technology and GenAI. This will impact the way we operate and serve customers. Importance will be placed on the highest quality of ships with the lowest carbon footprint and the best technologies for serving customers. At the same time, safety and crew well-being will remain paramount, and new technologies will help the industry to raise those standards.
What are some examples of cross-department collaborations that Cargill is pursuing?
PJ: We believe that we can’t go about creating a modern experience for our customers if we haven’t ourselves taken the first step and modernized the way we interact with our internal customers. We made the decision to move early with implementing this modern interface with our own product lines who procure their dry and wet bulk freight needs from Cargill’s Ocean Transportation business.
Given the volume transported of more than 40mio mt each year, starting there was no small act. After only a few weeks of utilizing IMOS X we onboarded over 100 Cargill users from our Ag & Trading and Metals trading businesses globally. Although this is only the first initial phase the feedback has been incredibly positive.
By bravely embracing this change within Cargill, we want to transform ourselves as we also transform the experience we provide for our customers.
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To learn more about our Strategic Technology Agreement with Cargill and how we are supporting their ambitions, read the press release here.
Nicholas Emmett
Grace Yanagi
Raj Sodhi