Welcome Seatrans Chemical Tankers to Orbit!

We’ve been writing and speaking about maritime software and speed lately (see this blog and this replay from a recent Marine Money panel with our friends from Kongsberg Digital and Veson Nautical).  Speed is the raison d’être for software.  Software processes, analyzes, interprets and organizes information, it performs calculations, it tells you where your ships have been and where they are right now.   

Can a person accomplish these tasks without software?  Of course.  A person armed with a pencil and paper, a financial calculator and a telephone can compute TCE, figure out ROB and estimate where a VLCC is on the water. Indeed, most things software does, humans can do, too, but software does them faster. 

The chartering team at Bergen, Norway-based Seatrans Chemical Tankers is among the most capable in their sector, yet even they can move faster especially when it comes to understanding which competitors are viable rivals for cargoes.  Understanding the possible rivals requires that the team:  

• Log in to multiple systems 
• Pull data from each, 
• Copy it into a spreadsheet  
• Perform ad hoc analysis that cannot be shared easily across departments 
• Wait for third-party market data that may take days to deliver

By the time they get this information it may be too late.  Someone else has won the fixture. “When it comes to competitive intelligence, compiling market analysis took a lot of time,” said Tom Skare, managing director at Seatrans Chemical Tankers. 

Now, the chartering team can log in to one product:  Orbit’s OMI: Maritime Intelligence and Analytics solution.  Here’s how it works: 

End users select a list of vessels or fleets they wish to monitor which are then visualized on desktop, tablet or mobile device through OMI, a cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution. Leveraging multiple data feeds including AIS data, vessel characteristics and historical voyages, Orbit’s AI and machine learning reveal competitors’ positions, activities at port and likely next destination, all with a series of clicks, behind one login. 

“OMI lets us see the big picture for each opportunity in one system so we can make faster, better informed decisions,” notes Skare.  “In a matter of a minute, we can see trading patterns of an individual vessel and drill down into vessel details to determine if it can even take on the actual cargo in play.”   

Reducing a multi log-in process from days and hours to a minute…that’s speed.  Armed with OMI, charterers get the information they need in time to act and win the fixture.  “For competitive insights to have value, they must arrive on time,” says Ali Riaz, CEO of OrbitMI. “OMI helps transforms what were once time-consuming fragmented tasks into a seamless, connected workflow.”   

Much like their streamlined, deep-orange LPG tanker Trans Catalonia (pictured above) moves through the water with ease, so does information flow through Seatrans Chemical Tanker’s streamlined workflows. To learn more about how Orbit can streamline your workflows, click the button below to book a demo.