Interview with Dr Pierre C. Sames

Dr Sames: Well, thank you for the question. I believe our maritime industry is well prepared to adapt but it is different for different players. Not all the stakeholders have the same abilities and resources to go through that kind of transformation, which is enabled by digitalisation. We could have a look at all these stakeholders one by one to understand the different forces that are playing out.Looking first at those that create systems – the equipment suppliers. We see them as drivers of innovation in this new arena. It is their systems becoming cyber-physical that really form the foundation of the digital revolution in our maritime industry. They are drivers and I believe they are well-prepared.

The second stakeholder is shipyards. For shipyards, this play will be much more difficult. We see them taking advantage in design and production but when you look at the entire lifecycle of the assets, it will be much more difficult for shipyards to take a role in the operational phases well.

Now looking at ship owners and ship operators, it’s different for different ship types. We would argue that for those owners operating in liner services they would be very much prepared and professionalised, and they would take advantage of digitalisation. Whereas those in the tramp shipping business might become followers.

The next stakeholder that we could look at is service suppliers – like classification societies. We have been data managers all the time. Our task was to look at the condition of the ships, perform analysis and advise our customers. That will potentially not change but it will be made more transparent and more efficient with the use of digitalisation. Thus, I would argue that classification societies are principally well prepared for that step. We at DNV GL have just launched an open data management platform called Veracity, which is helping our customers to break down the silos to share information and to have better analytics.

Last but not least, authorities. It’s important to put the whole picture together. Flag state administrations will certainly benefit from the information collected. The question is – how much are they able to share the information that they have? In this digital world, sharing is caring. We need to come together to make it work, so all stakeholders need to do that.

Dr Sames: I believe that the European maritime industry is a larger member of the global maritime world. I don’t see it as a particular European advantage that is developing. This is also not a disadvantage of the European maritime cluster. What I see however is that there is a lot of public attention and public funding to support new developments. This might only be available in places like Europe and Singapore where the Government and authorities really take care about the competitiveness of their local players.The flagship research programme in Europe, Horizon 2020 of the European Commission, is actually taking steps to increase the competitiveness of companies in a digital world. Looking at production, there is an initiative called Factories of the Future that is looking at advanced manufacturing on a larger scale. There are significant investments, tens of millions of Euros going into these projects. When it comes to shipping and shipbuilding, the investments are unfortunately not that big. This is also due to the fact that our industry is actually too fragmented when compared to other industries.Being so fragmented with so many hundreds of players in Europe, It is very difficult to form a united view on what is needed in the future. Without that united view, we might fail to send that message. If you cannot send that message, you will never receive the support from the Government. The maritime industry in Europe is thus struggling these days to come back together again to be united – and that is a requirement of successfully facing these challenges that we see.

DNV GL was one of the founders of another flagship initiative called Vessels for the Future, but we have unfortunately not been able to deliver a united view on our future. So, we have a challenge in this respect that is to come.

Dr Sames: I believe that the first element to focus on is to transmit a sense of urgency to your staff that this change is needed, and that this transformation is going on where we cannot wait to sit down and relax. I would argue that companies that have an advantage are those that have recently transformed themselves a number of times or experienced larger changes. That is what we see from DNV GL.When it comes to the speed of transformation, I believe that we have yet to adapt to that. What we observe today is a speed that is driven by digitalisation, which is much faster than everything we have seen and observed in the past. In this arena, I believe that companies need to consider changing their speed inside of their companies. Our agenda at DNV GL is to understand that speed and to understand that transformation and to continuously learn so that we can move forward as an entire team. We send our people to relevant training sessions so that they understand the speed and impact of digitalisation, and then translate that back into actions that we want to implement. We have set ourselves the goal of becoming data smart by 2020, so we are on full speed ahead to transform DNV GL.Let me also recall that we created the first industrial revolution when sailing ships were replaced by steam ships. We went stronger, or became stronger, when the second industrial revolution happened with electricity being implemented. We then went on to the first large computing devices – the third industrial revolution. We believe that we will come out stronger in or after this fourth industrial revolution has been implemented. We are very much working towards it as we embrace these changes.

Being data smart for us has several components. The first is to utilise the data that we already have in a smarter way. Traditionally, the data of a classification society is on paper. So, we will need to utilise that, transform it and thereafter start to collect and organise our data in a digital fashion. That is obviously step one.

The next step is to transform our existing services to be digitally delivered so that we go away from using documents to use digital models to do our jobs. We are going away from time-based inspection to condition-based inspection. These are transformation of our existing services.

But there are also new things that can be established. We are also looking at new services that were not available before. This only became possible with the help of more data sets that we have access to where we merge these data sets together, filter and analyse them to deliver new insights.

Dr Sames: When it comes to the people who are employed in our industry, they certainly need to continuously learn. We certainly see a stronger trend towards more automation in our industry when it comes to design, approval and production. It’s very likely that some jobs will be lost but there will also be many new jobs created.Looking back, I believe that people had always been fearful of the future – we were afraid that there would not be enough jobs that could be created. That’s the same challenge that we face today. I’m a strong believer in opportunities and I would argue that we will be able to create many new and exciting jobs. They would have names that we have not even heard about. I believe we can stay relevant in this context by continuously learning and by embracing these changes. We at DNV GL are bringing in new kinds of skill sets that we do not have today.We send our people not only to courses on digitalisation but also to courses like Top Tech that is happening every year in California where our lead experts become exposed to other technologies. It’s about looking left and right to understand what is going on just next to you, and possibly what’s happening left and right is actually more important and have an impact on what we do tomorrow. So it’s always good to look at other technologies that are emerging to understand what possible impact they could have on us, our customers and also the society at large. This is also where my unit, Group Technology and Research, is very strong. Our task is to explore new technologies and find out how big an impact they would bring about. After we have identified these technologies, we would work on technology development – testing, piloting and prototyping.