New platform is aimed at boosting decarbonisation efforts across the sector by improving data standardisation and transparency

Technology company ZeroNorth has today revealed its new open Vessel Reporting Platform, which will improve transparency and data quality, enable emissions reductions, and lower manual work at sea and on shore.

ZeroNorth has designed the new open Vessel Reporting Platform to help underpin decarbonisation efforts within the shipping industry. The platform is aimed at solving key challenges associated with gathering accurate data from vessels and will boost data transparency.

The new platform will enable masters to ensure data is accurate and complete before reports are sent to shore. It will help to ensure that gathered vessel data offers a true representation of vessel performance, in turn providing the industry’s optimisation solutions with more robust inputs. This will lead to more accurate and powerful fuel and emissions savings recommendations from these types of software.

The web-based platform offers a means of seamless user experience for data entry, saving crew time and cutting onboarding requirements. It will ensure quality data is gathered on the vessel and also enable owners and operators to easily share standardised data across the supply chain. It works online and offline and can be used simultaneously across different devices, allowing crew to complete and submit vessel reports that are then shared to all stakeholders, avoiding duplication of effort.

The platform’s more than 200 in-platform data validation points will ensure data is entered accurately and completely. For example, the platform will check that data has been entered in the right format or sits within plausible boundaries for normal operations of a given vessel, based on sailing conditions and vessel-specific parameters.

The new Vessel Reporting Platform is open to the industry and is available as a standalone solution that requires minimal system setup. For ZeroNorth customers, the new tool is fully integrated into the ZeroNorth platform to further power up the voyage, vessel, bunker and emissions optimisations generated by the software.

The issue of improving data quality around vessel reports was recently raised by Impact Today, the decarbonisation working group founded by ZeroNorth and other maritime leaders. The working group’s recent Vessel Reporting and Data Quality white paper called for the maritime sector to create a new data standard aimed at evolving noon reports into holistic vessel reports to support vessel and voyage optimisation – and therefore the industry’s decarbonisation ambitions.

Speaking on the announcement, Jesper Bo Hansen, Chief Revenue Officer, ZeroNorth said: “With today’s launch of our Vessel Reporting Platform, we take a big step to solve the key issue of data quality and transparency that is currently acting as a barrier to industry decarbonisation.

“We know how time-intensive vessel reporting can be and understand how critical these reports are for owners and charterers alike. Vessel reports remain one of the best sources of information on ship and fuel performance, so it is only right that we try to find ways to improve and validate data being supplied from ship to shore.

“Our new Vessel Reporting Platform sets out to solve these challenges, providing crew and shoreside staff with a clear, standardised, and easy way to improve reporting so they become more transparent and accountable to counterparties, and, ultimately, are better able to propel their decarbonisation efforts.”