The Next Generation of Complete Shipping Solutions?

The Cambridge Dictionary describes next generation as follows: “used to describe a product that has been developed using the latest technology and will probably replace an existing product”. But the meaning and interpretation of “next generation” differs from person to person and gives a lot of room for interpretation. 

From a technological perspective there is currently at least a shift happening within the shipping and commodity trading industry to move to greater digitalization which has been impacted by Singular Point’s shipping software called MARiS – the next generation of complete commercial shipping solutions.

Up until now, there have been very few software vendors offering a complete shipping solution in the industry and with most of them, if not with all of them, companies are forced to follow the functionalities and processes provided by the software as is.

Changing anything, or adding something new to the system, is very often not possible to do or comes at a very expensive cost.

But it’s not only a matter of changing something inside a shipping solution, it’s also about accessing data. To date, companies have had to spend a lot of time and resources, on integrating external data into their shipping software, making sure that they have systems in place that can communicate to each other. So, with the complexity of integration and cost of change of current shipping solutions, this has forced companies to fall into standardization and missed the opportunity to evolve digitally.

Furthermore, asking the vendor for change anything within a shipping system, can also contain some hidden risk. Imagine a vessel owning company would like to add new functionality within the system, which will provide value to its daily business and give it a competitive edge over its competition. This enhancement will allow the software vendor to re-sell the enhancement to another vessel owning company and thus potentially remove the competitive edge. For those and other reasons, MARiS has the potential to become a game changer in the industry and thus reach the next generation level.

Beside all the traditional chartering, operational, financial and reporting features a shipping software normally comes along with, MARiS offers additionally a new level of flexibility. MARiS’ architecture basically allows companies to adapt literally every single system logic and behavior, according to their specific business requirements. This includes changing the way how the system should behave including data model, business logic, process representation, workflow and much more, without relying on a third party vendor or Singular Point. 

Furthermore, MARiS is a web-based solution, which enables companies to integrate with minimum effort and thus low cost, any desired data into the system. This could include, data delivered by sensors from a vessel’s engine, data coming from another system such as SAP, or from a Commodity Trading and Risk Management (CTRM) system, allowing companies to access and analyze their data in one place – in MARiS. 

Singular Point’s MARiS University, will provide MARiS users all the instruments necessary to evolve their version of the system in any direction they will want, finally empowering the market players to stay unique and not fall into the standardization forced by other systems available today. This flexibility, and the architecture’s power, has attracted the attention of many companies in the shipping and commodity trading industry and underlines the need for a more flexible solution, which MARiS delivers.