Established in 2001, RightShip is an Australian company that specialises in improving safety and environmental sustainability in the global maritime industry.
The firm’s comprehensive maritime risk management system helps ship operators and charterers to avoid preventable accidents by evaluating factors such as casualty history, vessel age and terminal performance. RightShip’s tools are used by more than 300 large organisations across 40 countries.
The problem
RightShip had relied on the same set of vetting tools since its inception in 2001. Whilst these tools had served the company and its clients well, significant advances in technology and increases in data volumes meant there was a need to upgrade.
In 2015, the company unveiled a new risk management platform. Dubbed RightShip Qi, this version uses sophisticated big data and analytics tools to spot patterns and make predictions about likely future events.
RightShip Qi draws on much larger data sets than was the case with the previous platform. As a result, the data had become more challenging to manage and required new methods for effective analysis and extraction.
“We needed to find a way to generate readily understandable diagnostic reports that could confirm the data sets were functioning as they should and thus producing accurate intelligence for our clients,” says Wayne Blumenthal, RightShip’s Commercial and Strategic Manager.
Blumenthal says his company had been working closely with Altis Consulting throughout the development of RightShip Qi and so turned to them for advice on how to improve the internal reporting function.
The solution
After reviewing the requirements brought about by the large data sets, the Altis Consulting team recommended use of the Tableau analytics software platform. The team was confident this could take the data underpinning Qi and provide easy-tounderstand reports for the company’s IT and management teams.
Working closely with the RightShip IT team, Altis provided support in the form of project governance and change management. This ensured maximum value was obtained from the new visualisation tools while avoiding any disruption to business processes.
“Altis staff worked very effectively with the RightShip team and quickly became trusted advisors,” says Blumenthal.
“With consultants from a number of locations providing specialist expertise to supplement our internal capabilities, Altis had the expertise to fully understand the challenges we were facing and assist us in developing a strategic approach to overcome them.”
“They also challenged our traditional thinking which provided us with new perspectives on exactly what was possible to achieve with the reporting from RightShip Qi.”
“Altis Consulting will remain an important strategic partner for us. Their thorough understanding of our business and deep technical knowledge means they will continue to be able to add value both to RightShip and our clients’ operations.”
– Wayne Blumenthal – Commercial & Strategic Manager
The benefits
With the new platform and strategy in place, Altis worked to apply best-practice data visualisation techniques. This supported RightShip’s goal of telling a story of complex data in a compelling, accessible and business-focussed manner.
“We were soon able to create visualisations of the Qi predictive model ratings and clearly display the reasons why a particular vessel’s rating had changed,” says Blumenthal. “Such visual insights had not previously been possible.”
Altis’ in-depth understanding of RightShip’s business environment, together with the company’s experience in visualisation techniques, ensures the complex connections that exist between data points can now be readily understood and resulting insights put to work to improve the quality of service offered to clients. The cause of any volatility within the data sets can also be quickly identified and evaluated.
Blumenthal says RightShip is now in a much better position to take all available data and turn it into useful, actionable information. “This means we can assist our clients to make more informed choices between different vessels, and know that those decisions are based on fact rather than anecdotal evidence.”
“The bottom line is that we hadn’t released a major system for 16 years, however Altis does this all the time. This experience and knowledge was invaluable in delivering what was a large and complex project.”
The future
RightShip is continuing to work with Altis to find further ways that visualisation techniques can be used to improve the way data is used within the company.
“The amount of data available is only going to grow in the future, and so we are focused on finding new methods of putting it to work,” says Blumenthal. “We are keen to find ways to make further use of both structured and unstructured data to ensure we can provide the most informed insights possible.
“Altis Consulting will remain an important strategic partner for us. Their thorough understanding of our business and deep technical knowledge means they will continue to be able to add value both to RightShip and our clients’ operations.”
