How to unlock digital transformation in shipping

Companies within the shipping industry are at a pivotal moment, facing pressures to enhance efficiency, safety, and build new offerings through digital innovation to stay ahead of increasing competition.  

Despite the clear benefits of digital transformation, several obstacles persist—chief among them being 1) the challenge of attracting and retaining tech talent, 2) the high costs associated with scaling in-house development, 3) balancing core business focus, and 4) a general lack of expertise in the field. 

Talent acquisition and retention: Attracting and retaining tech talent is a significant hurdle, and the shipping industry is competing with other industries for skilled professionals. Recruiting and retaining tech talents with expertise within both the maritime industry and digital technologies can be challenging, and while the maritime industry overall is lagging behind in digitisation top talent tend to look towards industries ahead of the curve. 

Costs of scaling in-house development: Developing and implementing digital solutions often require substantial investments. While some of the bigger players in the industry may be willing to make such investments, we often see smaller organisations struggle with the upfront costs associated with adopting or developing new technologies. Scaling in-house development teams to handle complex software projects can strain budgets and resources, and are often becoming a blocker for innovation. 

Balancing core business focus: More often shipping companies must strike a balance between their core business operations and digital initiatives. Devoting resources to digital transformation while maintaining day-to-day operations can be overwhelming or simply not possible due to prioritisation and resources available. 

Lack of expertise and awareness: The shipping industry in general is still in the early stages of digital adoption, and many stakeholders lack awareness of the full potential of digital technologies. Combined with the scarcity of industry-specific expertise in areas like data analytics, cyber security and IoT or AI, effective implementation of new technologies can be very challenging and become a true barrier for unlocking the efficiencies linked to digitisation. 

While the benefits of digital transformation are clear, overcoming these challenges requires strategic planning, collaboration and a determined effort to bridge the gap between maritime tradition and technological innovation. An alternative to in-housing complicated digital innovation, is to partner up with established experts within both the shipping and digital solutions. 

Custom Software Development at Sea

At Sea, we’re shaping the future of global maritime trade. Our cutting-edge technology and collaborative framework are fostering continuous innovation within the sector, and we invite industry leaders, partners, and visionaries to join us on this journey. 

Building a solution for industry-leading corporations

Our Custom Software Development service specialises in creating solutions tailored to maritime corporations’ specific needs, and we understand your industry, your challenges and tech. 

Through deep engagement, we identify and analyse the unique challenges to develop solutions that directly address the operational or commercial needs delivering software solutions fast and cost-effectively while ensuring you have full ownership and control of the solutions created. 

To ensure long-term value, these solutions are scalable and adaptable, built on customers’ existing digital infrastructure. 

Forging powerful industry alliances

In the shipping industry, challenges exist such as safety, operational optimisation or crewing that no startup or single corporation can solve alone. These issues are often non-competitive and complex in nature, and require solutions that need to be widely adopted across the industry to be effective.     

These are not typical cases for external funding, yet these challenges must be solved in our industry and provide value, benefits and improvements for both people and companies in shipping. There’s a significant opportunity for larger players to pool resources and expertise to create pioneering solutions that address known issues across the value chain to lift the entire ecosystem, drive progress and set new benchmarks for industry efficiency.  

Sea is pioneering a new approach where companies within the sector can collectively tackle shared challenges. It enables multiple corporations to collaborate by having a needed solution, while sharing the cost and co-owning the IP and solution. 

 This new offering represents a major step forward, and by leveraging our expertise and our teams, we can provide a strong foundation that accelerates the development and deployment of these shared solutions. 

 Share your challenges and ideas with us, and we can build something truly trailblazing, or reach out to learn what we are already building…

Our technologies & competencies 

At Sea, we have already built solutions for a number of shipping industry leaders and know to work effectively with large teams in agile tech development. 

We bring comprehensive capabilities, technologies and expertise to the table; from crafting intuitive front-end interfaces with HTML, CSS, and React.js, to deploying scalable solutions via Microsoft Azure and AWS.  

Our expertise extends to robust back-end solutions using .NET, Node.js, and Python, offline-first solutions using modern PWA tooling, and seamless API integration with maritime and weather data providers.  While these are our core technologies, we are also not confined to them and are frequently exploring new tools and technologies to meet our clients’ evolving needs. We ensure top-notch security and compliance, expert database management, and insightful data analytics with tools like Power BI and Tableau.   

By integrating these capabilities, Sea delivers tailored, scalable solutions that enhance operational efficiency and drive innovation across shipping. 

Contact Sea via this link to explore how we can collaborate to develop the digital infrastructure needed to pull the maritime industry into the future.