Shipping's Digital ROI Extends Beyond Fuel Savings

The shipping industry is reluctant to invest in digital technology without a clear, calculable return, often focusing narrowly on fuel savings. Experts contend this view understates the broader value of digitalisation, which includes preventing downtime, reducing administrative burdens, and improving decision quality.

Gert-Jan Panken, general manager and vice-president at Inmarsat Maritime, says digital ROI should encompass vessel uptime, maintenance efficiency, safety, cyber resilience, and crew welfare. He also highlights the "cost of complexity," where a single platform replacing multiple systems creates real, though often budget-scattered, savings. The central difficulty is that digitalisation rarely saves money in just one area.

Beyond the Bunker Statement

Nico Lehtinen, director of digital transformation at Elomatic, argues owners must look beyond fuel to engineering productivity, maintenance planning, and crew wellbeing. The challenge is quantifying benefits like an avoided machinery failure or a prevented casualty, which lack an invoice but can dwarf a software's annual cost.

Joy Basu, chief executive of Smart Ship Hub, states fuel dominates discussions because it is the easiest saving to measure, not the most valuable. His broader calculation includes crew hours returned through automation, compliance work removed, and downtime avoided. Basu says automated reporting can return up to 70% of the time crews spend on noon reports.

This reveals a major accounting blind spot. Manual work's cost is buried in existing headcount, making it seem free, while a new application appears as a fresh expense. Some of the largest returns are preventive, like predictive maintenance interrupting chains of costly consequences.

Hard-to-Value Returns

Safety presents an even harder calculation. Technology improving situational awareness may prevent an incident whose probability is unknown. Henning Davies, chief executive of LedgID, points to reduced administrative effort and improved retention as returns often missing from narrow assessments.

Vikas Pandey, chief executive of Shipfinex, pushes the calculation to the balance sheet. Better digital records can influence financing, due diligence, and ultimately the value investors place on a vessel. A ship with a continuous digital performance record represents a different risk than one with scattered paper records.

Digitalisation can become part of the asset itself, with returns emerging at refinancing or sale rather than when the software invoice is paid.

Measuring Impact, Not Activity

Gry Sørås, head of branding and sustainability at Siglar, argues digital ROI should be judged through business impact: compliance exposure, chartering outcomes, and decision quality. "A technology system does not create value because people log into it. It creates value when a different decision follows," she says.

P K Mishra, managing director of IRClass, similarly states the industry needs to measure technology through operational outcomes like faster analysis and better reliability, not digital activity. ROI is highly specific to the operator, with no universal percentage proving digitalisation works.

The Emissions Efficiency Link

When asked which digital tool delivers the highest return on emissions reduction, SplashTech found concentrated responses pointing to voyage optimisation, weather routing, and hull and engine performance monitoring. These technologies attack emissions through operational changes rather than expensive physical modifications.

Basu argues fuel efficiency and emissions reduction are essentially the same operational problem viewed through different lenses. The most useful system continuously closes the gap between actual and potential vessel performance. Small corrections in speed or route compound across fleets. "The sensor layer beneath it is not a detail; it is the whole game," Basu says, stressing optimisation cannot outperform poor information. Sørås adds that the highest-return tool is ultimately the one that changes a specific business outcome.