Shipping has never been a slow-moving business.
Vessels move. Markets move. Customers call. Ports become congested. Bunker prices change. New opportunities appear. Risks develop. Decisions often need to be made quickly.
Yet many maritime professionals still spend a surprisingly large part of their working day searching for information, checking different systems, copying data into spreadsheets, updating colleagues and digging through emails.
People are hired for their experience, relationships and judgment. Not to spend their days searching for vessel information, copying data between systems or trying to figure out which spreadsheet contains the latest update.
And that is why manual, repetitive work is not simply an operational inconvenience.
It can also have a pretty high commercial cost, because the biggest cost of fragmented software and manual work may be the business you never had time to do or the information you didn’t pursue.
When information is scattered across emails, spreadsheets, documents and different software solutions, even relatively simple questions can require several steps. The real cost is therefore not simply the minutes spent searching. It can be:
Over the years, companies involved in maritime business have added more and more software.
One for AIS. Another for sea routing. Another for technical descriptions of vessels. Spreadsheets for internal data. Email for communication. SharePoint folders for documents. MS Teams for collaboration.
Individually, these tools may solve specific problems. But you need time to find the information, and collectively, they can create another problem: fragmentation, where the knowledge and experience of employees become the integration layer.
People have to move between systems, connect the information themselves, remember what needs to happen next, make notes on the side, or copy and paste (or script) information into Excel to try to make sense of it.
We believe software should work differently. That thinking is behind ShipIntel Essentials.
ShipIntel brings essential maritime features and high-quality real-time and historical AIS data together in one solution, while allowing teams to integrate their own private data and collaborate.
ShipIntel is an interesting alternative to the traditional approach of buying several separate maritime software solutions or developing internal software. Its main proposition is not just vessel tracking or maritime analytics, but combining maritime intelligence, everyday workflows, team collaboration, and private company data in one environment.
Imagine looking at a vessel, port, or company and having much of the information you need connected to it.
In ShipIntel, a vessel page can combine real-time AIS information, current and previous voyage information, historical trading patterns, ownership, insurance and classification information, sanctions, compliance features, technical descriptions, and historical operational events.
On the port page, you will find which vessels and types of vessels have visited each port, how many have visited, which vessels are currently at the anchorages and where they came from, which vessels recently departed and where they are heading. You will also find bunker grades and prices, holidays, local time, weather forecasts, etc.
Your team can also connect and add private information to vessels, ports, and companies, including documents, photos, shared notes, and email correspondence. Relevant companies and contacts can also be connected to vessels and ports, ensuring all relevant information is easily accessible in one place.
That changes the workflow, broadens your understanding, and hopefully gives you more time to do business. Since people are hired for their experience, relationships, and judgment rather than collecting, categorizing, and cleaning data, it also makes work more enjoyable.
A lot of manual work in shipping is not really productive work. It is checking information.
Why should a person repeatedly check something that software can monitor?
ShipIntel allows users to create alerts for vessels, ports, and areas. Notifications can be delivered via email, Microsoft Teams, pop-ups, and mobile devices.
The problem is not email itself. The problem is that commercially valuable information often remains buried inside messages.
ShipIntel approaches email differently.
Instead of creating a standalone email client, ShipIntel connects email with maritime entities and workflows. Emails can be connected to vessels, ports, cargoes, companies, contacts, calculations, fixtures, schedules, and voyages.
So rather than searching through an inbox to reconstruct what happened around a vessel or port, the correspondence can become part of the relevant maritime context.
Commercial shipping teams rarely need information about every vessel at the same time. They need the right vessels for the situations and purposes they are working on.
ShipIntel lets users create vessel lists using criteria including technical characteristics, ownership, classification, P&I insurance, and sanctions. Dynamic lists can automatically update when vessels meet or no longer meet the criteria selected by the user.
That can turn another repetitive process into continuous monitoring.
Instead of rebuilding the same market picture every morning, teams can create the view they need and monitor changes.
Finding a vessel is often only the beginning.
You have to understand routing alternatives, distances, voyage duration, bunker options, or emissions.
ShipIntel's sea-route calculator can route from ports, live vessel AIS positions, or map coordinates. Users can compare alternative routes, account for canal and strait constraints, identify bunker ports along a route, and calculate EU ETS-related carbon emissions. Again, the idea is not simply to add another feature: it is to avoid manual work.
Public maritime data is valuable. But for most companies, the real competitive advantage appears when external information is combined with what your company knows.
ShipIntel allows proprietary information to be integrated alongside its maritime data while keeping that private information confidential. Teams can attach documents and photos, share notes, and connect correspondence, companies, and contacts to vessels and ports.
And because ShipIntel integrates with Microsoft 365, it can work with Microsoft Entra for access control, Exchange for email, SharePoint for accessing information linked to vessels, ports, and companies, and MS Teams for notifications and notes.
This matters because digitalization should not mean forcing employees into yet another fragmented silo. The goal should be to connect the information they already use with the maritime intelligence they need.
There is an even bigger reason why reducing fragmentation matters: AI needs context.
If your relevant information remains scattered across spreadsheets, email inboxes, documents, and disconnected software systems, it becomes harder to turn that information into useful intelligence.
ShipIntel has therefore been designed as an integrated environment where maritime data can be combined with workflows and proprietary company information. Maritime Optima's approach is to break down data silos so that richer context can support analysis and AI-enabled outputs.
The future of maritime software should therefore not simply be about digitizing today's manual processes. It should be about removing unnecessary processes altogether.
We don't believe experienced maritime professionals should spend their days copying information between systems.
We don't believe they should repeatedly check information that software can monitor.
And we definitely don't believe valuable commercial knowledge should disappear inside inboxes, spreadsheets, and disconnected applications.
People should spend their time where they create the greatest value:
Technology should take care of more of the searching, structuring, connecting, and monitoring.
That is the idea behind ShipIntel Essentials: bringing maritime intelligence, workflows, collaboration, and company information closer together in one maritime workspace.
Because ultimately, productivity is not about doing more administrative work faster.
It is about having more time to do business.
ShipIntel by Maritime Optima helps our company reduce the costs and time associated with developing and maintaining software. ShipIntel is a SaaS solution continuously developed and maintained by Maritime Optima without putting the invoice on our desk.
ShipIntel gives our employees the opportunity to contribute to the development of software that helps us do more business and that our employees want to use, without us carrying the costs and risks of developing and maintaining it. All product development and improvements are included in the annual fee per seat we pay to Maritime Optima.
With an almost 24/7 support channel with a human in the loop, Maritime Optima always wants to help our employees by answering questions and providing guidance when needed. Instead of sending support tickets that might not be answered until the following month, Maritime Optima replies almost immediately.
ShipIntel helps us tap into a solid foundation of high-quality maritime data and become ready for the potential value that AI can unlock for us.
For many years, Maritime Optima has collected, and continues to collect, live raw AIS data from satellites, terrestrial and dynamic AIS sources, along with other publicly available maritime data. They have also used these datasets to train their text-parsing models.
Since Maritime Optima cleans, unifies, and processes all these data sources in-house and has trained AI models to understand shipping and specific niches of the shipping industry, we also learn how to work with AI models and our private unstructured data.
Maritime Optima has built a very advanced maritime sea routing engine with vessel-specific routing intelligence and constraint-based optimization, which is also available through a separate API.
By bringing data, workflows, collaboration, and AI readiness into a single platform, ShipIntel helps us learn and explore new technology, reduce costs, be innovative, and work smarter. We also feel that ShipIntel, together with the people working at Maritime Optima, helps us unlock new opportunities for growth.
Psst!
The pricing model is designed for small and medium-sized companies as well as large enterprises, so make sure you get started today.
