Shipping has never been famous for opening its wallet on a promise, and digital technology is no exception. Fuel remains the easiest return to prove, but the industry's real technology dividend increasingly lies in avoided downtime, reduced administration, stronger compliance, better decisions and assets that simply perform better. This is the latest installment from the new SplashTech magazine.

Shipping likes innovation considerably more when somebody can put a dollar sign next to it. The industry will spend $100m on a vessel because the asset, financing structure, earning assumptions and residual value can be modelled. Ask the same owner for a comparatively modest sum for software promising better decisions, fewer mistakes or improved visibility, and the interrogation becomes considerably more forensic.

There is nothing irrational about this. Shipping is cyclical, margins can disappear quickly, and technology vendors have spent years promising transformations that proved difficult to measure. Owners have learned to distinguish between an impressive demonstration and a bankable return.

Fuel savings therefore dominate the digital business case because they are unusually legible. Burn 20 tonnes instead of 21 and somebody can calculate the saving before lunch. The problem, SplashTech's contributors argue, is that this narrow definition increasingly understates what successful digitalisation is worth.

A broader definition of return

Gert-Jan Panken, general manager and vice-president at Inmarsat Maritime, says digital ROI should encompass vessel uptime, off-hire, maintenance efficiency, onboard interventions, safety, cyber resilience, regulatory readiness and the speed and quality of decision-making. Crew experience belongs in the calculation too: connectivity that improves welfare, training, medical access and retention carries a commercial value even if it never appears on the bunker statement.

There is also what Panken calls the cost of complexity. If one platform removes several systems, contracts and support relationships, the saving is real even though it may be distributed across budgets and therefore invisible to a conventional ROI calculation. That gets to the central difficulty: digitalisation rarely saves money in only one place.

The easy number wins

Nico Lehtinen, director of digital transformation at Elomatic, argues that owners need to look beyond fuel towards engineering productivity, maintenance planning, operational efficiency, safety, crew wellbeing and decision quality. Digital investments should reduce costs, but they should also create additional business value. The challenge is turning those benefits into numbers that survive an investment committee.

An avoided machinery failure has no invoice. Neither does a casualty that never happens, a port state control delay avoided through better records, or a superintendent who identifies a problem two weeks earlier because the right information reaches shore. Yet any one of those outcomes can dwarf the annual subscription cost of the software involved.

Joy Basu, chief executive of Smart Ship Hub, argues that fuel dominates because it is the easiest saving to measure rather than because it is necessarily the most valuable. His broader calculation includes crew hours returned through automation, compliance work removed, downtime avoided through predictive maintenance, safety incidents prevented, schedule reliability, insurance benefits and the preservation of asset value through a better documented operating history.

Smart Ship Hub sees automated reporting returning up to 70% of the time crews spend compiling noon reports, Basu says. Man-hours are rarely treated like bunker tonnes because salaries have already been budgeted, but that does not make those hours free. This is one of maritime digitalisation's great accounting blind spots: manual work often escapes scrutiny because its cost is buried inside existing headcount. A new application appears as a fresh expense; the 20-year-old process consuming hundreds of employee hours appears to cost nothing. The comparison is obviously false.

Some of the largest returns from technology are preventive. Predictive maintenance is a straightforward example. The value is not the alarm itself but the chain of consequences the alarm interrupts: machinery damage, emergency spares, unplanned attendance, off-hire, schedule disruption and potentially a lost chartering opportunity.

Safety presents an even harder calculation. Technology that improves situational awareness, identifies a developing machinery problem or gives crews better access to procedures may prevent an incident whose precise probability can never be known.

Henning Davies, chief executive of LedgID, points to reduced administrative effort, faster processes and improved retention as forms of return that frequently disappear from narrow technology assessments. The economic impact of wasting a senior officer's time is especially easy to overlook because the organisation sees the salary but not the opportunity cost.

Vikas Pandey, chief executive of Shipfinex, pushes the calculation further into the balance sheet. Better digital records can potentially influence financing, due diligence, charterparty disputes, asset transparency and ultimately the value investors place on a vessel. That matters as the industry gradually creates richer digital histories of its ships. Two nominally identical 15-year-old vessels need not represent identical risks if one has a continuous record of machinery performance, maintenance, fuel consumption, incidents and operating practices while the other comes with scattered spreadsheets and paper records. Digitalisation can therefore become part of the asset itself. The return may emerge at refinancing, sale, insurance renewal or chartering rather than in the month the software invoice is paid.

Decision quality has a value

Another difficult return is simply making fewer bad decisions. Gry Sørås, head of branding and sustainability at Siglar, argues that digital ROI should be judged through business impact: compliance exposure, chartering outcomes, administrative workload and the quality of decisions made using the information available. A technology system, she says, does not create value because people log into it. It creates value when a different decision follows.

That distinction is crucial. The maritime tech industry has become skilled at counting users, data points, dashboards and alerts. None is necessarily a commercial outcome.

P K Mishra, managing director of IRClass, similarly argues that the industry needs to measure technology through operational outcomes rather than digital activity. Faster analysis, fewer manual interventions and better reliability matter because of what they change onboard and ashore.

This also makes ROI highly specific to the operator. A performance platform may produce enormous value for a fuel-intensive fleet trading long ocean legs while delivering less for another operation. Automated documentation could be transformative for a company overwhelmed by reporting requirements but marginal for one that has already streamlined the process internally. There is no universal percentage that proves digitalisation works. The baseline matters. So does the problem being solved.

From emissions to economics

When SplashTech asks which digital tool delivers the highest return on emissions reduction, the responses become much more concentrated. Voyage optimisation, weather routing, trim and speed optimisation, and hull and engine performance monitoring repeatedly rise to the top.

The attraction is obvious. These technologies attack emissions through operational changes rather than expensive physical modifications. Better routing can avoid adverse conditions. Better speed decisions reduce unnecessary consumption. Hull monitoring identifies performance deterioration. Trim optimisation helps extract more from machinery and hull forms already installed.

The regulatory backdrop reinforces this. The IMO's Carbon Intensity Indicator grades vessels on their operational carbon intensity, and the EU Emissions Trading System has extended carbon costs to shipping emissions. Both regimes tie commercial consequences directly to operational efficiency, which strengthens the case for tools that measure and verify consumption rather than merely report it.

Basu argues that fuel efficiency and emissions reduction are essentially the same operational problem viewed through different lenses. The most useful system is the one that continuously closes the gap between how a vessel is performing and how it could be performing.

The gains can look almost trivial at the level of an individual decision. A marginally different speed, earlier hull cleaning or altered route rarely makes headlines. Applied repeatedly across dozens of ships and hundreds of voyages, however, small corrections compound.

"The sensor layer beneath it is not a detail; it is the whole game," Basu says, stressing that optimisation cannot outperform poor information.

Gry Sørås makes a related point. The highest-return tool is ultimately the one that changes behaviour consistently. Whether labelled voyage planning, weather routing, emissions analytics or fuel optimisation matters less than whether the information reaches the person able to make a better operational choice. A recommendation ignored has zero ROI.

The optimisation stack

The most effective emissions technology is therefore increasingly a stack rather than a single application. At the bottom sits reliable measurement: fuel flow, shaft power, engine condition, speed, draft, weather and other high-frequency operational inputs. Above that comes normalisation and analysis. Then comes the decision layer: routing, speed, trim, maintenance or operational intervention. Finally comes verification: did consumption actually improve?

Pankaj Sharma, chief executive of OneLink Performance, sees value in connecting those layers rather than treating individual optimisation products as isolated tools. Hull and machinery performance, voyage decisions and operational KPIs become more powerful when interpreted together.

Petter Andersen, vice-president at StormGeo, similarly works in a field where the return depends on combining weather intelligence with vessel-specific performance. The shortest route is not necessarily the most economical, and the most economical voyage cannot be determined from weather or vessel data in isolation.

That is why simplistic vendor claims of percentage savings invite scepticism. The achievable return depends on ship type, speed, route, weather, hull condition, existing operating discipline and the quality of the baseline. A badly operated vessel has more low-hanging fruit than an already optimised one. This creates a paradox for successful technology suppliers: the better their system works over time, the harder each additional percentage point becomes to find.

Pay for outcomes

Owners' suspicion of vague ROI claims is also changing how maritime technology is sold. Outcome-based pricing, phased rollouts and managed services are all attempts to reduce the distance between promise and proof.

Basu argues that providers confident in their value should increasingly be willing to connect commercial terms to measurable results. Cheap entry combined with payment for outcomes removes some of the leap of faith traditionally demanded from owners.

Lehtinen favours phased implementation that demonstrates business value continuously rather than requiring a large upfront commitment before the evidence exists. Panken similarly supports outcome-led managed services with predictable costs, clear accountability and measurable performance, aiming to avoid forcing customers into repeated technology bets as networks and applications evolve.

This suits shipping's temperament rather well. The industry does not need to become less commercially demanding about technology. Quite the opposite: vendors should be forced to explain what changes, how it will be measured, what the baseline is and when the customer should expect to see a return.

But owners also need to modernise what they count. If digital ROI is restricted to fuel, some of the most valuable applications will always struggle to clear the hurdle. Crew time, maintenance, off-hire, regulatory exposure, cyber resilience, safety, retention, financing, asset value and decision quality all have economic consequences.

The next phase of maritime digitalisation will therefore depend as much on better accounting as better technology. Shipping will continue to open its wallet cautiously. Given its history, that is unlikely to change. The opportunity for maritime tech is to make the savings too obvious to ignore.