Stolt Tankers and partners help bring transparency to shipping

Back in 2019 and 2020, Stolt Tankers became part of the Smart Maritime Council Working group to standardise a noon report based on ISO 19848:2018 Ships and marine technology. Now, together with several contributors, the Smart Maritime Council has published a free and open Standardised Vessel Dataset (SVD) for noon reports.

The goal is to offer maritime stakeholders a central reference point for data mapping that can be applied by shipping companies, technology providers, or any related third parties to improve the digital capabilities of the industry.

What is a noon report?
A noon report is a data sheet prepared by the ship’s senior officer that shows the daily operational information of the vessel. The standardised data includes vessel position, fuel consumption, power consumption, power generation, weather and navigation information. That data is used to assess the performance of the ship.  

A good start is half the work

“This was the first real effort to standardise noon report data across our various suppliers. The idea was to have the process of gathering the data automated and exported using a standard format," said Sean Crowley, Senior Electrical Project Manager, Stolt Tankers, pictured far left with members of the Smart Maritime Council in February.

"We provided the data from our test ship, helped to standardise the format and then, along with Transas, we sent it to a Dell Boomi interface (a cloud-based platform that allows you to connect different applications, data, and systems), which converted it to the standard output.”   

The Stolt Tankers project team worked with Dell to set up a prototype. The list was then further updated by other ship owners/managers and tested on some of their ships as a proof of concept.

Lift off
Recently, the SVD for noon reports was launched by the Smart Maritime Council following the completion of a proof-of-concept (POC) project. The POC involved vessel operators OSM Maritime, Thome Group, and V.Ships who supported the project by providing data points for the SVD.

The initial report template and standardised list was created by the Smart Maritime Council in collaboration with Stolt Tankers. Rui Pinto and Sean Crowley at Stolt Tankers worked hard to help create the initial Noon Report template from which the SVD was created.

The standardised data from the different companies was shared with Lloyd’s Register (LR), acting as the technology partner on the project. This data was then uploaded into one of LR’s software platforms adapted to accept the standard format for analysis.  

Free and open reporting
The POC project was successfully completed having delivered a standardised set of data points covering common items within the noon report. This initial beta version of the SVD is intended to be a starting point for a continually expanding list of maritime operational data points, to provide an open common naming structure and reporting format for industry stakeholders to facilitate data exchange and analysis by removing unnecessary mapping and translation work.

The SVD for noon reports has now been made available as an open list of standard data points for vessel operations for any maritime industry stakeholder outside the Smart Maritime Council membership to download and provide their feedback.