With a quagmire of digitalization and decarbonization options facing shipowners today, cutting through the smoke is increasingly difficult to find and implement the most efficient solutions. Launched today is a new, free-to-use Software Evaluation Toolkit aimed at the shipping industry and designed to enable ship owners and managers to make better informed decisions on digital solutions needed to decarbonize fleets.
The toolkit, dubbed SET Maritime, is vendor-neutral, developed by OrbitMI, a US-based software-as-a-service provider. According to the company, the sole purpose is simplifying the software selection process as the industry seeks to navigate the vast landscape of digital solutions.
Connecting 'digitalization' to 'decarbonization' is the mission of multiple organizations accross the maritime world, and accoring to OrbitMI chief executive Ali Riaz "One obstacle for the industry has been the lack of suitable user-defined benchmarking criteria to assess the bewildering array of applications available. Consequently, there has been little understanding of how to evaluate different applications so the whole business of software selection has been poorly informed, which has proven a big barrier to adoption.”
To address this, SET Maritime is designed to serve as a structured toolkit with a range of criteria to evaluate software vendors in various categories including company profile, solution architecture, usage and extendibility, reports, dashboards and visibility, pre- and post-fixture features, and voyage management and operations. Designed to be easy-to-use in a workbook format, the freely downloadable and customizable open-source toolkit allows software vendors to be ranked by the user according to their scores in each category.