Shipping industry and the great technology integration challenge
Shipping Industry
Unlike other industries, the shipping industry is an ageing industry. The impact of digitization is comparatively less and many shipping industries are yet to embrace technologies. The primary reason behind this churn is IT complexity which disrupts businesses. Maritime leaders fear that technology changes will add cost overheads and lead to inefficiencies. Most of these problems can be conquered with an integration framework that can help teams in keeping up with the technology changes and improve operational performance, productivity and life cycle.
An Overview of the Shipping Industry
The Shipping industry is the lynchpin around which international commerce revolves. It is considered as most critical transportation modes and trusted delivery mechanism. It can be also said that seaborne trade reflects the worldwide economy. Over 90% of the world trade is done through seaborne trade.
Technology Integration Challenges
A world-class organization needs to work as a collaborative unit with a single view of cross-functional processes. This becomes possible with a comprehensive technology integration solution. It can virtually combine the shore-based management team to work closely with the shipboard management team.
Technology changes and IT are transcending the shipping operations. Gradually, the changes will bring large-scale change in the industry. The industry will move from a lower state of higher ones. The technology-intensive environment will reduce accidents during seafaring and make the delivery of goods faster. Organizations can treat different fleets travelling at a distance as one unit. Communication tools will help teams sitting on the shore to know what is happening inside the ship.
Since the beginning, the shipping industry has shown resistance to change. It has relied on hands-on approaches to management. It lacks some basic management models that are present in other industries. A primary reason for this hesitation is a lower return on investment (ROI) than other industries.
Technology changes and kickbacks
Technological change is a long-standing decision for any shipping organization. It poses dilemmas for cargo shippers that controlled the regime. There is a significant lack of standards in this field. Other industries like Aerospace, electronics and pharmaceuticals are heavily dependent on research and not shipping. Companies face tough challenges while upending paper-based manual systems with new technologies.
Teams set up multiple sources of truth while entering data into the systems. And most of the data resides in silos and not accessible to other team members. Teams face several data errors while exchanging data with partner networks.
Many shipping companies still use archaic methods to share data internally or externally. They use hand-coded approaches to connect business systems. Problems overflow when they code everything and develop integration hairball. Changing one code alters the functioning of another code.
These challenges can be conquered with an automated integration solution. It leverages a no-code solution to build integrations and allows business users to build integration flows.
An end-to-end data integration solution can ensure seamless flow of data and help organizations to optimize their supply chain operations. Without much engineering resources involved, teams can integrate data between target and source elements, harness more value from it, and improve efficiencies. Also, they can deal with surging customer expectations in a better way.
Real-time data sharing brings greater coordination and collaboration between land and sea teams. A wide variety of data in different file formats can be shared with partners without any disruption. Data transformations become easy and simple without any coding. By eliminating data errors and multiple sources of truth, teams can streamline shipping operations to a great extent.
Most of the problems in the shipping industry are caused by technology gaps existing between them. Integration can bolster shipping operations in ways we have never seen before. Teams can overcome barriers like IT complexity, increased administrative cost, and accelerate time to revenue.
They can build integrations on the fly, share data seamlessly with partners, become easier to work with, and accelerate time to revenue. This advantage will help them getting continued success from their investments.
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