CIOIN

Anjan Deb

CIO, Great Eastern Shipping

Business users sitting at the corporate office would have to wade through a huge pile of data to find what they needed, leading to a waste of time and frustration

Executive summary

Lost at sea: That was almost true for corporate executives at Great Eastern Shipping, who didn’t have a way to effectively monitor their 40-odd ships, which spend months on the move. IT changed that.

The Organization: The Great Eastern Shipping, which transports crude oil and petroleum products, gas, and dry bulk commodities is one of India’s largest private sector shipping companies. The shipping industry, in general, isn’t sitting at the cutting-edge of technology, something that CIO Anjan Deb realized two years ago when he moved from  the BFSI industry. “After having spent many years in the tech-savvy BFSI industry, moving here was a bit of a culture shock,” he says with a chuckle.

That’s also when he realized he needed to do something about it.
The Business Case: The 40-odd ships that Great Eastern operates spend months at sea and have little constant contact with headquarters in Mumbai. They certainly had no automated way of connecting to the company’s datacenter.
But while the ships are at sea, they have to be monitored. A workaround the company devised required the master of the ship to manually collect fleet management data, like ship inventories, compile it in an Excel and e-mail it to headquarters twice a day. This was a painful process and it meant that no two masters followed the same process. “There was no standard procedure. And as ships are in different time zones, data came in at different hours. Business users sitting at the corporate office would have to wade through a huge pile of data to find what they needed, leading to a waste of time and frustration,” says Deb.
One solution to keep ships connected to the datacenter, open Internet access, was prohibitively expensive, at about Rs 500 per MB. “Imagine paying so much for 40 ships!” says Deb.
The Project: In response to the problem, Deb and his team developed application, LIVIS (Live Vessel Information Systems) that automates the data collection and data sending.  The solution gathers all the data generated by a ship’s systems including ERP and other propriety ship-based applications, compiles it into an e-mail and automatically fires it from the master’s mailbox. The application crawls through the ship’s systems periodically and sends new information to land.
And because it allows business users to search for relevant data, something that was impossible to do before, Deb calls it the ‘Google search’ of Great Eastern.
The Benefits: Having information on a centralized platform has made inventory management, maintenance of vessels, and ship monitoring much more effective and simpler. For example, if an executive wants to analyze the fuel consumption—an expensive commodity—he can turn to LIVIS and draw quicker, more accurate conclusions. “It’s helped us make better informed decisions on issues like engineering, maintenance, and inventory management,” explains Deb.
And by allowing business executives to work without having to consult scattered systems, it’s lowered user frustration and heightened the profile of IT.