Speaking to The Motorship<\/i> exactly two months after he sat down at his new desk, he recalled that he had commented to the interview panel about the company\u2019s three stand-alone products: its ship routeing services, its voyage planning and route optimisation tool and its fleet performance software. His message was simple: \u201cImagine if you could cross-sell one product into another,\u201d he had remarked.<\/p>\n
On joining, he soon learned that bringing those three together was exactly what the company had been planning for about two years. \u201cI was thrown into the deep end,\u201d he said, with no time to tread water as this week\u2019s launch of that new product, dubbed the \u2018s-Suite\u2019, rapidly approached.<\/p>\n
It brings together those three products and makes them part of a modular package with additional functionality. Some customers bought one, two or all three products, while some bought \u201conly a half,\u201d he said. They still can, but now they all draw from a common database and are accessed from one user-interface. It marks a waypoint for the company, which has grown by acquisition \u2013 including, in February 2019, DNV GL\u2019s fleet performance management activities \u2013 leading to what Mr S\u00f8rensen called three service silos.<\/p>\n
It was customer feedback that provided the impetus to clear those away. \u201cIt became obvious that customers would like us to serve them in a more integrated way,\u201d he said. \u201cThat led to the vision of creating one software platform, backed up by super-strong maritime professionals, so that we would make their life a lot easier.\u201d<\/p>\n
Readers may be particularly familiar with two of StormGeo\u2019s current products, Eco Insight and Navigator Insight. They previously formed part of its fleet performance management \u2018silo\u2019 but now fall into the s-Insight part of s-Suite.<\/p>\n
With the change, a ship manager ashore using those and other StormGeo fleet performance management services will use the same data and interface as the onboard team using its voyage planning module. \u201cThey will be speaking the same language,\u201d Mr S\u00f8rensen said, because they will be using the same software, which has been newly developed for the combined suite.<\/p>\n
Just bringing its databases together has made the suite more powerful than was possible before, he said. StormGeo serves 12,000 ships worldwide and bringing together performance metrics from all those vessels creates a \u201cmagnitude and wealth of data that makes it easier to give good advice,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Two of the modules \u2013 s-Insight and s-Routing \u2013 benefit from StormGeo\u2019s Fleet Performance Centers in Hamburg and Singapore, each staffed by ex-seafarers, from both bridge and engineroom. StormGeo claims to be unique in offering in-house software combined with external experts and Mr S\u00f8rensen described their role as providing \u201ca fully tailor-made advisory service\u201d that provides feedback based on a detailed analysis of a ship\u2019s performance data, with suggestions on how it might be improved.<\/p>\n
There is no obligation to use their services, however; customers can receive the data direct to perform their own analyses, although even then it has received some pre-processing to \u201cmake sure it is presented to the customer in a way that they can carry out an analysis.\u201d<\/p>\n
German shipowner Hartmann Schiffahrts has been using an early version of s-Suite and StormGeo\u2019s Fleet Performance Center for about six months and has been impressed by its performance. In a statement, StormGeo quoted its head of dry cargo, Capt Christian Stefes, as saying that it used them because it was essential \u201cthat our shore-based operators connect with the vessel, trusting the accuracy of the data they use\u201d to reduce costs and emissions.<\/p>\n
But one detail about s-Suite remains a mystery, even to Mr S\u00f8rensen: what does the \u2018s\u2019 stand for? He deferred The Motorship<\/i>\u2019s question to his chief marketing officer, who said it could stand for many maritime-related things, including \u2018StormGeo\u2019, \u2018sea\u2019 and \u2018sustainability\u2019. It also stands for \u2018S\u00f8rensen\u2019; perhaps that is the real reason why he got the job.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Kim S\u00f8rensen said the right thing when he was interviewed for his new position as chief operating officer at the Norwegian weather routeing specialist StormGeo. Not that he knew it at the time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":601,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-monitoring-control-digitalisation"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.motorship.com\/propulsion-and-future-fuels-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.motorship.com\/propulsion-and-future-fuels-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.motorship.com\/propulsion-and-future-fuels-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorship.com\/propulsion-and-future-fuels-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorship.com\/propulsion-and-future-fuels-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=600"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorship.com\/propulsion-and-future-fuels-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorship.com\/propulsion-and-future-fuels-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.motorship.com\/propulsion-and-future-fuels-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorship.com\/propulsion-and-future-fuels-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorship.com\/propulsion-and-future-fuels-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=600"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorship.com\/propulsion-and-future-fuels-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}