Digital solutions for your decarbonization journey

Digitalization has a key role to play in the energy transition, helping ship owners, operators, and charterers comply with evolving regulations and reduce vessel emissions.

To help our clients advance their decarbonization journey with digitalization, Bureau Veritas has partnered with OrbitMI. OrbitMI’s software enables ships to optimize their commercial and environmental performance using a single, collaborative interface that can be integrated with existing digital tools.

Recent GHG regulations concerning CII, EU ETS and the forthcoming FuelEU Maritime align commercial goals, such as profitability, with environmental goals – mainly reducing emissions. As such, the needs of charterers and ship owners become better aligned. The OrbitMI platform provides solutions that can facilitate collaboration between both parties.

Through its partnership with OrbitMI, Bureau Veritas heightens its support of shipowners making data-based decisions about the right short- and long-term solutions for reducing emissions.

Changing course in a fragmented sector

The maritime industry was founded on a spirit of ingenuity that favored bold individual actors. Today, trying to reconcile this history of fragmented ventures with modern connectivity often presents the industry with challenges concerning data sharing and collaboration.    

The energy transition – and the digitalization needed to inform and guide it – is no exception. Marine actors, who have traditionally worked slowly and independently, are facing a complex and increasingly urgent challenge.

Regulations governing vessel emissions, including the Carbon Intensity Indicator (CII), the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) and Fuel EU Maritime regulations, are growing more stringent. These frameworks target the energy efficiency of operational systems, meaning that commercial interests will see significant impacts. Ships will need to steadily reduce their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions now and 2050, under tightening timelines.

Compounding these challenges, is the shipping industry’s relationship with data. Vessels collect an extraordinary amount of information including speed, fuel consumption, estimated arrival time (ETA) and distance traveled, etc.
But this information – traditionally emailed as a spreadsheet – is often of poor quality.

Digital technologies can improve the quality of data collection and transmission, amplifying the power of shared information. By putting data in context with digital tools, key metrics including weather readings, engine status and hull fooling conditions, can translate to improved ship performance.

To realize impactful changes throughout shipping, stakeholders industry-wide must establish baselines, set key performance objectives, define metrics and monitor improvement. The driving force behind all of these processes is digitalization. 

Using digital collaboration to improve the energy efficiency of ships

At the vessel level, one of the most important steps a ship operator can take to reduce their ship’s carbon footprint is improving data collection. At the industry level, maritime actors can collaborate, sharing data on activities that concern the efficiency of all ships (e.g., port entry times). By improving data quality and data sharing, the shipping industry could more quickly reduce emissions and improve vessel performance, both individually and collectively.

To help shipowners and ship operators accomplish this, Bureau Veritas has partnered with OrbitMI, a software solution and data aggregator. OrbitMI’s software, Orbit, unifies existing digital systems and feeds data from external companies into a single interface. This enables shipowners to make data-driven decisions about their decarbonization efforts, while helping vessels perform more sustainably and efficiently.

OrbitMI’s dual capacity as a provider of software solutions and an aggregator of both systems and data is particularly useful for shipping companies aiming to meet decarbonization requirements. As a pure Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) actor, OrbitMI requires no hardware or software installation onboard or onshore, enabling companies to deploy the solution without upfront cost and maintain their digital systems without service disruption.

How Bureau Veritas and OrbitMI work together

By combining Bureau Veritas’ classification services and engineering expertise with OrbitMI’s high-quality data and solutions, we address client challenges in several key areas.

• Improving environmental performance: Orbit helps ships reduce their GHG emissions by creating distance- and weather-optimized routes, alerting staff to deviations in speed, ETA and fuel use. This enables them make decisions to minimize bunker consumption.
• Eliminating data silos: Orbit enables ships to communicate better with onshore parties at crucial moments, such as during port entry. This reduces the ‘sail fast, then wait’ phenomenon that many vessels experience, arriving quickly at port, then idling until a berth becomes available. By leveraging OrbitMI’s digital solutions, maritime actors at sea and onshore experience better workflows.  
• Facilitating data collaboration: By aggregating data from multiple sources and integrating this data in one platform with a single user interface, Orbit enables ship owners, operators and charterers to collaborate efficiently through various use cases. This includes integrations with Bureau Veritas data and services by leveraging our regulations and technical expertise. The Orbit platform is built on a flexible, modular architecture which enables integration with other software, APIs, data sources and end-users’ current internal systems.  Furthermore, Orbit will integrate with future systems, making it a platform for ongoing innovation.
• Reporting and compliance: Orbit capitalizes on the wealth of data already available from most vessels, including monitoring emissions during voyages and over defined periods of time. From there, OrbitMI’s COMPLY solution can generate reports for regulations including the IMO DCS and CII as well as the EU MRV and ETS reporting.

While collaboration among ship owners, operators, and charterers will be vital to advancing the energy transition, maritime actors will also need the support of other industries. With our extensive network and decades of experience, BV helps facilitate these connections, building partnerships with companies specialized in science, technology and environmental studies. By leveraging collaborative efforts, we can to deliver the best guidance for our clients toward a more sustainable future.