Willem Vermaat, shipping director at Heidelberg Materials Trading, on today’s technology glut that is holding shipping back.

There’s a phrase I’ve been using lately that tends to get a reaction in a room full of shipping people: “garbage in, garbage out – we’ve just made the garbage move faster”. Some people laugh. Some people flinch. But quite a few nod a little too vigorously, which tells me they know exactly what I mean. I sit on the cargo side of dry bulk, where we move cement, aggregates, clinker and solid fuels, and a large part of my working life involves being sold technology that promises to transform our business. Some of it has. But too much of it has just taken cluttered, inconsistent, commercially guarded data and put an expensive and shiny interface on top of it. The cluttered data is now just digitalised clutter. We’ve digitised a lot, but transformed little.

The problem isn’t the technology. It’s what we’re feeding it.

Data quality has improved, for sure. Connectivity is better, platforms are more capable, and the direction the industry is moving in is right. But a significant portion of the data flowing through our systems is still wrong, incomplete, or deliberately managed. Vessels report ETAs that serve commercial purposes more than operational ones. Terminals don’t expose their real berth productivity. Cargo owners, myself included, guard load readiness data until the last moment because information is still one of the few edges anyone feels they have.

The numbers support this. A 2024 World Bank study found that despite mandates for electronic data exchange, only a third of over 100 ports surveyed were in full compliance. And when it comes to vessel ETAs, the single most important data point for coordinating schedules, around 36% of AIS messages include no ETA information at all, and half of those that do are inaccurate. Whether by mistake or deliberate manipulation. We’ve been trying to solve basic arrival visibility for decades. But when reporting an ETA, the master adds a buffer of a few hours, the operator in the owner’s office adds a little more, and whoever else sits in the chain likely does the same.

So many voyage management systems and market analytics dashboards now market themselves on how connectable they are, on how many data sources they can plug into. “Interoperability” is the latest buzzword being used to sell platforms. The technology itself is really impressive. But if the data being fed in from these ever-larger oceans of data remains unreliable, the outputs will be too.

Less polish, more reliability.

The industry has started confusing the sophistication of the presentation layer with the reliability of the underlying data. I can now tell you, in a shiny real-time dashboard, exactly what went wrong last quarter. What I cannot get however, is a dependable answer to: “should we push this stem two days, or hold it?”. That’s the question that actually costs or saves money.

I’m a friendly sceptic, not a cynical one. I truly believe in what this technology could do. But the next wave of efficiency in dry bulk won’t come from a smarter algorithm, it will come from better inputs and standardised reporting. Perhaps we should be spending more time developing contractual frameworks that reward transparency, and have the honesty to admit that the lack of trust and openness across this supply chain is a commercial problem, not a technical one.

Fix what goes in. Everything else follows.