Narayan Venkatesh, co-founder and managing director of Tilla Technologies, on what airlines can teach shipping when it comes to crew planning.

The shipping industry is not exactly known for its high pace of digitalisation – and yet a lot has developed over the last few years. Change and innovation are visible in all areas of work. In all of them? Well, not really. Crew planning is still handled in roughly the same way as it was twenty years ago.

It can sometimes help to look beyond the horizon to find an explanation for a phenomenon right in front of our eyes. In this case, we’ll take a look at an industry that has many similarities with shipping and has yet developed in a completely different way: Aviation.

Both industries transport goods and people around the world. They are inherently global. They are highly regulated and risk-averse and the assets used are very expensive.
However, while aviation has long been a highly digitalised industry – including in the area of crew planning – this only applies to shipping to a very limited extent. Why is that?

How is crew planning different in aviation? 

A flight lasts a few hours on average, whereas a ship journey often takes weeks or months. In aviation, crew members complete several flights per shift or week. In the event of disruptions or delays, crew members are automatically informed immediately and can even use a bidding system to decide when and on which flights they are deployed.

This is not the case in the shipping industry. Seafarers often wait weeks for information on their next assignment, which can take place at any time. Delays and disruptions in crew planning quickly lead to chaos. Crews can only dream of real-time updates; instead they are informed by email or phone call. What digital technology is available is usually outdated and takes place in silos. It should be clear that this causes stress for everyone involved – from the crew manager to the employees of the travel agency involved to the crew members – and is also prone to errors. It is also clear that this is not efficient and therefore more expensive and time-consuming than necessary.

Why did aviation go digital so early and so extensively? 

Air passenger transport began in the 1920s and grew gradually in the interwar years. Initially, scheduling for passengers and crew was manual. By the 1940s, the increasing number of passengers demanded a better solution. American Airlines, then the largest U.S. airline, developed the “Magnetronic Reservisor,” a computerized system using magnetic tape technology. This allowed faster and more accurate reservations, handling information for 1,000 flights up to ten days in advance — an essential advancement for modern aviation. However, the Reservisor was soon outdated, and in the 1960s, IBM created the “Semi- Automated Business Research Environment” (SABRE), again for American Airlines, enabling the processing of tens of thousands of bookings daily.

That’s how the digitisation process started. While passenger numbers in the aviation industry rose massively, and with them the number of flights operated and the need for on-board and ground staff to be deployed around air traffic, passenger numbers in the shipping industry fell. Today, transporting people is only an insignificant part of global shipping. Instead, the transport of goods by ship has grown continuously, but the transport of goods by ship simply requires far fewer employees on board than is the case with passenger transport.

In other words: for decades, many more people have been transported by air at much shorter intervals than at sea (this applies to crews as well as passengers), which is why aviation was virtually forced very early on to come up with efficient, automated digital systems to manage this complexity. In shipping, on the other hand, this complexity – although constantly growing – was never great enough to force a fundamental modernisation and digitalisation.