Poor data quality costs time and money, making investment in data management crucial, warns an IT company.

Shipbuilder

Shipbuilder believes improving data quality offers "enormous financial benefits". Photo: Shipbuilder.

Improving data quality offers "enormous financial benefits" and increases employee work satisfaction, said Shipbuilder.

Geert Schouten, director, said: “Nevertheless, we see that many maritime companies do not work on data quality and that costs a lot of money and time. Some millions of euros (and a lot of man-hours!) slip away while problems, caused by poor quality of your project data, are being solved.”

Taking the example of a ship specification document, to which many people contribute, Einte Kamstra, new business & sales manager at Shipbuilder, said frequent issues with data management include the data not being adjusted when a document is amended; a reluctance to draft specifications; time constraints; the use of different terminology by different people; and the resumption of writing after breaks or holidays in - accidentally - outdated versions of the document.

The ship specification of some 1000 pages or more is usually still checked and verified, but the result of that will never be a 100% correct version, said Shipbuilder.

Providing access to the right software will enable a maritime team to work with the right information at every stage of a project. The advanced data management program by Shipbuilder is one such solution.

Artificial Intelligence makes stepping into digital transformation to enable smart data management even easier, said Shipbuilder. Mr Schouten said: “AI enables you to convert all specifications that are hidden in different types of documents, into a structured database. "

By Rebecca Jeffrey