Please tell us about SOL-X and what you offer, and how your product improves safety.
SOL-X is a leading IIoT safety technology company centered around human factors. Combining deep industry knowledge with IIoT capabilities and predictive AI, our focus is on improving safety and compliance outcomes, increasing operational productivity, and enhancing workers wellbeing.
Our solution SOL-X together with our connected wearable technology, SOL-X SmartWatch, addresses in a holistic approach to worker safety and wellbeing. Our integrated hardware and software solution was designed by our internal maritime experts to meet the unique requirements of high hazard environments.
SOL-X addresses Control Of Work and Crew Wellbeing in several ways. First, it integrates Control Of Work software with streamlined step-by-step workflows, data validation, and authorized crew signoffs.
In addition, crew are provided tablets for vessel-wide site permit preparation and risk assessments, while on-board operations dashboards provide near real-time safety operations and workflow monitoring. Crew location can also be easily tracked with Crew Finder and Crew Assist. Furthermore, an integrated ship-to-shore management platform streamlines digital approvals and communications. This digitized Control Of Work data can be used to highlight safety, compliance, and operational excellence leading indicators for continuous improvements.
Ensuring a strong Control Of Work, is almost dependent on maintaining the physical and mental wellbeing of the crew conducting their tasks. SOL-X helps to proactively manage workload, reducing risk of fatigue and, through connected wearable features, is able to provide situational awareness of nearby risks and help crew monitor their own wellbeing. This information can then be incorporated into health and safety programs.
In essence, SOL-X ensures the right person is at the right location, and at the right time during Control Of Work planning and execution. Based on feedback from our customers, they have saved up to 4,600+man hours per vessel in a year, through our integrated permits and Work-On-The-Go capabilities.
How do you differentiate from your competitors?
Our solution leverages on IIoT and AI to ensure compliance of critical safety processes – namely that the right person is at the right location, at the right time and working on the right task. It improves safety operations through crew location tracking and near real-time management of workflows. SOL-X also improves crew situational awareness of hazardous locations with proactive alerts. Our ATEX certified wearable technology enables capabilities in connected health and wellness programs. On the AI front, we can identify leading indicators in operational excellence and safety compliance for pre-emptive interventions and long-term continuous improvements.
How have shipowner attitudes to digital adoption changed over the last few years?
The digital evolution is shaping the maritime future in every aspect and in all its segments, taking advantage of the design of modern ships and new technologies like machine learning, AI etc. More shipowners are fully embracing concrete opportunities and advantages that digitalization can bring. About two thirds of shipping companies have started on their digital journey and are exploring solutions as we speak. Embracing digitalization requires a full vision from understanding the actual and future needs of a fleet, to creating every step needed to make digitalization happen; and as an example, we are seeing great industry leadership and support from global leaders such as Shell and MISC Berhad, actively working with us to implement new technologies, such as SOL-X to specifically address their health and safety agenda in maritime and beyond.
Any new products/services planned?
Over the coming months, we will continue to launch innovative new product features that leverage our IIoT, wearable and AI capabilities to further our vision to build a safer maritime industry. With the penetration of our product continuing to grow and hundreds of seafarers actively using our product every day, we can now realise the true potential of this live dataset and have developed a new analytics platform that can identify, predict, and prevent health and safety incidents in advance.
In these crazy times, what are your clients asking you for most right now?
Our clients are asking us for assistance on digitalization of manual processes, addressing crew sustainability (particularly environmental exposure) – we are actively working with them to provide a strong business case for these investments that is necessary to kick off these projects internally.
Background:
Ricardo joined SOL-X in June 2022. He is an accomplished leader with deep industry experience and brings an excellent track record in enterprise sales for major technology companies in the maritime and telecommunications sectors. He has 20+ years of General Management and SaaS enterprise sales leadership with Wartsila Voyage, WTW, Teltronic, Satlink in corporate acceleration, exponential market share and revenue growth.