High-profile incidents like the Felicity Ace fire or the Ever Given running aground remain relatively rare — but when they do happen, even in-depth investigations from multiple global authorities often fail to provide answers on what went wrong and how to prevent something similar from happening in the future.
Large shipping losses declined by 40% in 2018 and another 20% in 2019, according to AGCS. But overall incidents are on the rise, especially with navigational issues and container fires onboard cargo and ro-ro ships. When an accident happens, it becomes an arduous process to dig through layers of litigation, insurance claims, and damages.
“A claim can take on a life of its own…Big claims happen, and that is why we have insurance. But it’s the little losses that eat your lunch.” – Captain Andrew Kinsey, Senior Marine Risk Consultant at AGCS.
Part of what makes this process so challenging is the lack of visibility within the maritime industry. Without a clear picture of day-to-day operations, there’s no way to know what precisely caused a given incident to take place. When that happens, it becomes a back-and-forth blame game where no one wins.
There’s a better way to handle maritime loss prevention: AI-powered maritime CCTV.
AI-Driven Loss Prevention for the Maritime Industry
Think of your standard dash cam, a common practice in the automotive industry for cars and trucks. Many insurance companies offer discounts on premiums or can use them to avoid an increase in your insurance rate by providing evidence you weren’t at fault in an accident. Opting-in to a dash cam also indicates a type of driver and company more focused on safety.
Standard CCTV solutions offer similar benefits; however, a few technical limitations mean they don’t always help insurers get the answers they need for your claim:
- CCTV generates thousands of hours of footage that are only possible to be seen after an incident occurs, making it impossible to prevent an incident before it takes place
- Without real-time ship-to-shore collaboration, footage may not be captured for pivotal moments, especially with incidents that damage or destroy the ship
AI adds a layer of visual context to these hours of footage, allowing you to de-risk operations every single day.
ShipIn’s FleetVision™ combs through data from cameras placed in key areas onboard, like the bridge, cargo hold, and engineering room, surfacing reports of suspicious or unsafe activity. The platform automatically alerts stakeholders onboard and onshore to any safety violations, creating a digital source of truth for all events.
Instead of trying to piece together reports from eyewitnesses, unreliable human memory, or the occasional onshore camera in port, you can more accurately assess existing and potential future risks and proactively address them. Not only does this make your business more attractive to insurers, this can help save thousands of dollars in claims cost should an accident occur by providing an accurate depiction of events on board.
De-Risk Your Entire Fleet With ShipIn
Loss prevention starts with a culture of safety across your fleet. Take, for example, a leading tanker company that decided to partner with ShipIn after suffering heavy losses from navigational incidents. Something wasn’t working — they wanted answers to questions like:
- Is the crew following all safety procedures?
- Is vital maintenance of equipment being conducted at regular intervals?
- Are safety incidents going unreported?
Once deployed, ShipIn’s system found the root of the problem by detecting a number of lapses in standard bridge watchkeeping practices through our “unattended bridge” report.
The AI-powered CCTV system alerted the team to this issue, which allowed the Master to brief his Bridge team on the importance of maintaining a proper lookout. Instituting new training practices and building awareness across the team has significantly reduced the “unattended bridge” alerts, improving navigational safety for everyone on board.
Bridge behavior is just one of the many safety concerns that technology can proactively address onboard shipping vessels today. ShipIn’s FleetVision™ platform proactively alerts shipowners, managers, and seafarers to onboard events in real-time, reducing losses by 40% and increasing efficiency by 8%.
With ShipIn, you can:
- Ensure accurate post-incident reporting. Footage prevented a leading shipping company from liability for a $100,000 claim due not to their navigational issues, but those of tugboats coming into port.
- Streamline the claims process. If an incident does occur, you have access to footage from multiple points across the ship, so you can determine what happened and whether or not you are liable, so you can provide all the information to your insurer as quickly as possible.
- Create safety benchmarks across your fleet. Share your learnings across vessels to prevent future incidents, allowing you to better implement safety best practices and systematically shining a light on your blind spots.
With data sent via the cloud to shore in near real-time, ShipIn enables true collaboration between captains onboard vessels and operations ashore. With all incidents and performance rolling up to an analytics dashboard, it makes it easy to benchmark performance, perform remote audits, and improve the operational ROI of your entire fleet.
