Dinesh Mohan, Global Head of Digital Services at Expleo, provides a menu of opportunities to maximise the benefits of digitalisation and boost operational efficiency in marine engineering.
The maritime industry is no exception in seizing upon the massive opportunities of digitalisation and IT-driven operational efficiency. For both commercial shipping and defence fleets, the complexity of marine engineering – from build and design to sailing and maintenance – requires data-powered technologies, secure systems and robust testing to ensure continuous quality improvement.
Sophisticated cyber-attacks, chronic skills shortages and platform availability issues are all challenges that leaders in the marine industry must urgently address.
Here are three key steps that leaders can make to advance their digital and IT performance.
1. Properly manage organisational data to ensure quality, consistency and clear ownership
In other words: how do you share the right data with the right stakeholders, while making sure your intellectual property is constantly protected?
This is a fundamental challenge for IT and digital leaders across the marine industry. Personal and identifiable information needs to be secure, with strict policies in place that control who can see, modify, delete, and update that data. These kinds of policies are especially critical when you’re dealing with multiple parties, teams, and nations.
In an industry as security focused as marine, sensitive data needs to be carefully segregated, managed, and governed. By implementing a comprehensive data governance framework, leaders can ensure data quality, establish clear data ownership, maintain consistency, prevent duplication, and make data easily accessible to the right people.
IT and digital leaders across the marine sector strive to manage and protect a vast sea of information. That’s near impossible without an efficient data management and governance framework in place.
Navigating success
Working with one of the world’s biggest fast-food chains, Expleo helped deploy a platform to launch their data governance and privacy initiatives across all markets. Our GenAI and data science expertise is also helping automate and enhance their data governance use cases, bring a potential ROI of nearly $3M U.S. dollars
2. Comprehensively manage your IT landscape, while reducing delays and software testing costs
Across the marine product life cycle, a whole suite of design, manufacturing, and resourcing tools are needed to keep your operations on track.
For this landscape to function optimally, you need to run continuous updates, testing, and integrations. But if all that’s being done manually, you’ll know just how costly and labour intensive it can be, with a single scenario potentially taking hours to test.
Reliance on manual input also makes it impossible to comprehensively test all new functionality going into production, leading to potential quality issues.
By introducing automated testing tools and techniques (like AI-driven test case generation), you can achieve extensive test coverage of your IT landscape and eliminate the need for manual input. Indeed, research reveals an 87% increase in ROI when companies adopt automated testing over a five-year period
Navigating success
Since 2015, we have developed more than 50 AI applications for leading organisations in various sectors, such as automotive, aerospace, defence, life sciences, retail and more. By using AI and automation to identify and execute crucial test scenarios, we’ve helped organisations to reduce testing time and lower costs by as much as 50-60%.
For example, in partnership with an online insurance firm, we developed a GenAI solution that automatically generates test cases — helping them keep pace with development sprints and create significant efficiencies in their value chain. Crucially, these tools can be adapted for a marine IT landscape.
3. Run PLM implementations smoothly and maximise system performance
Certified, secure, robust, and easily deployable. These are all critical outcomes when you’re testing and validating a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM)implementation or migration.
To ensure a successful PLM migration, it’s important to have a strong alignment between business and IT to minimise down time. Essential to your modernisation, PLM transformation efforts are also complex to manage. But with a water-tight plan and the right suite of digital tools, you can accelerate your progress while minimising disruption to your operations.
To address the complexities of moving from an on-premises ERP to a cloud solution such as SAP S/4HANA, you need to start with a comprehensive strategy. That strategy should involve a clear definition of your needs and identify potential bottlenecks, such as lack of upfront documentation or team bandwidth issues.
Technology is also crucial to success. By deploying a digital testing framework (combining AI-based analytics and automation), you’ll be able to conduct testing rapidly and at scale. This in turn will make it substantially easier to identify defects, make process improvements, and consistently hit project deadlines.
Navigating success
Expleo worked closely with a major energy company in Ireland to ensure their migration to SAP S/4HANA was smooth and reliable. Alongside the client’s functional SAP analysts, business stakeholders, and third-party suppliers, we created a robust Continuous Quality strategy. We then executed and managed all phases of testing, safeguarding the company’s systems and instilling confidence in their transformation journey. Despite the complexity of the switch, the client was ready to embrace the business benefits from day one.
Next stop: digital continuity
Every process, person, department, and workflow across your product life cycle are in some way connected. A design decision can impact the security of a platform, perhaps twenty years in the future. A recurring maintenance issue, identified during in-service, has huge potential value if it’s shared and acted upon by your engineering teams.
The key to a seamless flow of information hinges upon digital continuity.
At Expleo, we can help establish digital tools and processes that make it easier to collaborate, streamline handovers, share data, and facilitate back-and-forward feedback between all your teams. We can bring digital continuity to your entire product life cycle.