In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, data has risen to prominence as the new currency, driving innovation, shaping decisions, and redefining industries. The maritime shipping ecosystem has long been flooded with data, over 120 million data points each day, yet many stakeholders continue to struggle with effectively connecting this data to their daily decisions to build a strong maritime data strategy.

This industry-wide gap between data creation and utilization stems from three critical areas: challenges with data collection, data delivery, and data validation. While notable progress has been made in aggregating and delivering data, the maritime sector has grappled with the challenge of validating this data in a way that accommodates the industry’s volume and velocity. To lay the groundwork necessary to fully leverage their data advantage, industry stakeholders must overcome the validation hurdle and integrate high-quality, relevant data into their processes.

In a recent webinar, Vice President of Valuation Sales Tom Evans and I delved into the impact of data and how businesses can leverage it to strengthen their competitive edge. In this blog, I will distill the key takeaways from our conversation about how to develop a market-leading maritime data strategy that scales with Veson Nautical’s comprehensive suite of solutions, including valuation and market intelligence solution VesselsValue.

To watch the full recording of The Data Advantage webinar, download it on-demand here.

Data Validation as The Missing Link

The maritime shipping industry has access to a wide array of data, such as vessel particulars, vetting information, information about trade and/or tonnage flows, freight indices, fuel indices, carbon indices, and so on. But if this data is not accurate and relevant, delivered at the right time, or delivered in the right way, it isn’t very helpful. Whether you are a maritime stakeholder or a technology provider in the space, there are generally three best-practice steps that data must go through to be effectively leveraged in day-to-day decisions:

  1. Efficient data collection from high value sources
  2. Reliable and easy-to-consume data delivery
  3. Processes and rules in place to validate data for accuracy and actionability

With the validation piece missing for many stakeholders and technology providers, it can become nearly impossible to know if the data foundation you are building upon is of high-integrity and will produce consistent decision power over time.

VesselsValue specializes in data validation and their team of experts go to great lengths to ensure the vessel valuations provided across the world’s fleet on a daily basis are as accurate as possible. The VesselsValue team understands that even the best data models can’t protect against a ‘garbage in, garbage out’ scenario, so both the input and output data are stringently evaluated and verified. Their strength in data processing and validation proved to be a natural fit within the Veson suite of solutions. But what might it look like to integrate all three components into one unified data strategy? Let’s take a look.

Bringing It All Together

To realize our vision to be the standard platform that propels maritime commerce, we at Veson have been expanding on our offerings by continuing to develop products alongside industry needs, making strategic acquisitions, and forming product partnerships with key technology providers. With the addition of Oceanbolt, Q88, and VesselsValue, we can bring data collection, delivery, and validation together to provide comprehensive solutions that help our clients form a holistic data strategy.

When it comes to data collection in the Veson suite of solutions, Q88 and VesselsValue can be combined to provide a premier vessel database. Q88 is known for being the industry standard for vessel and voyage documents, particularly questionnaires, with details that are confirmed and exchanged pervasively in the wet market. This method of data collection and exchange is extending to the dry markets as well with Q88 Dry. The data that underpins the valuations offered by VesselsValue makes this database opportunity even more robust. In the future, we plan to offer this expanded vessel database as an added component to Veson’s existing data products.

In terms of data delivery, Oceanbolt brings an advanced infrastructure and ease of use thanks to its API and the distribution and documentation around it. Oceanbolt delivers insight into commodity and tonnage movements, primarily within the dry market. In addition, Analytics from VesselsValue Trade will strengthen the core dry market insight from Oceanbolt and elevate opportunities in other segments. VesselsValue delivers the validation needed to ensure all data maintains consistent high quality.

VesselsValue is built on the principle of data collection and validation, with stringent processes to help ensure accuracy, coverage, timeliness, standardization, and security. The addition of the VesselsValue team and solutions is an exciting step for Veson to round out our high-quality data suite.

Another important step for us is integrating key values from our data suite into the Veson IMOS Platform. Today, Veson IMOS Platform users can access vessel particulars through the Oceanbolt Vessel Particulars product, which is primarily composed of Q88 data. As mentioned, this offering will expand in the future to include the ownership hierarchies developed and maintained by VesselsValue to allow for greater insights. Another exciting addition to the Veson IMOS Platform will be CII estimates calculated by VesselsValue Green, which will enrich Veson’s sustainability offerings.

Build a Scalable Data Strategy with Us

Veson’s data offerings aim to provide a solid foundation for maritime organizations to achieve scalable data-driven success. This includes the comprehensive datasets offered by Oceanbolt, Q88, and VesselsValue and the ability to integrate aspects of those datasets with the Veson IMOS Platform workflows.

Together, Veson solutions deliver the most comprehensive decision-making capabilities in the market. Providing standardized, contextualized, and validated insights across the dry and wet markets will be a key step towards realizing our mission to be the standard platform that propels maritime commerce.

We have many exciting things ahead! Thank you to our community of clients, partners, and friends for continuing the journey with us and making our work possible.

To hear the full conversation and see a live demo featuring some datasets and derived data products from VesselsValue, access the webinar recording below and tune in at your convenience.