Emerging Technology Changing the Landscape of Marine Industry

As Director Operational Excellence at Overseas Shipholding Group, Eric Schreiber is responsible for researching technologies that meet commercial feasibility. Schreiber collaborates across departments and manages cross-functional teams to define the What, Why, and When of new products and services. In addition, he investigates and interprets industry trends and new technologies for development, builds business cases, raises funding, and starts new organizations.

With an engineering and business background in various industries, his experiences include managing projects, developing products, and growing services with international teams that deliver value to clients and growth for investors.

What are the challenges that have emerged, and how do you envision the landscape-altering quickly?

The supply chain is based on skill sets. As an engineering-intensive organization, we depend on highly skilled people, and that's been the most challenging aspect. No matter how advanced the technology is humans are still essential to understanding and fulfilling organizational goals. So it's important to keep those individuals engaged and employed as it's hard to find competent persons. Because once you lose competence, it takes months to develop the skill set and elevate the human competencies in operations.

What tactics have you employed as a company to mend your internal chains in light of the recent changes that have arisen?

Talking about the human element has sharpened our focus on the safety aspects. There is a tendency that if you stop operating machines and equipment for quite some time, you may become lethargic and stop using all of your skill sets. Therefore, we have truly concentrated on enhancing the safety element.

“No matter how advanced the technology is, humans are still essential to understanding and fulfilling organizational goals.”

From the perspective of enterprise performance, we begin embracing new metrics to elevate how we will appeal to our clients and new indicators, such as the intensity of greenhouse gases. Even though we always had this mindset, we evolved to quantify in better detail our areas of opportunity. As a result, quantifying and measuring process streams has presented a new challenge because we don't want to overburden the people with record keeping. So, that also introduced a lot of technical roadblocks by merging data silos. We have been gathering data for the sustainability report for the past two years, and it's been examined in greater detail as we evolve our performance.

What are some of the most important lessons your coworkers or peers can take from your experience?

Throughout my career, I have learned two valuable lessons from an organizational level. The first lesson learned is how to test the changes faster, especially when we had disruption due to a pandemic that stopped many of the operations. To follow the financial reporting metrics and fiscal calendar, it's important to discover and implement a way to test them before you hit a detrimental financial result.

The second and very powerful lesson learned is collaborating with your clients intimately. Sometimes we assume that all of our clients will respond similarly. That's not the case. Clients have different ambitions and leadership with various goals, benchmarks, and objectives. We have found that working closely with our clients is another strategy that works incredibly well for us. Therefore, you need to delve deeper and treat each client individually. You cannot assume that every client will be the same by extrapolation.

How do you envision the marine industry in the coming 12 to 18 months?

I believe the Marine industry is going through a very uncertain time. It means that we are under pressure to lower our emissions of greenhouse gases. The difficulty is figuring out what technological avenues we can take to change the fuel type we utilize to power the engines onboard our ships. Carbon capture technology has evolved and, you can either switch to a completely different propulsion system or add equipment to make the fuel or emissions impact much greener. However, if you make a choice now, you might not have a good path forward because there is uncertainty in the fuel supply to support the operational changes. . Therefore, I believe that carbon capture is undoubtedly one of the greatest methods to help businesses comply with the upcoming legislation.