Page 6: of Marine News Magazine (March 2015)

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EDITOR’S NOTE leet Optimization is a broad term which might be described as the best practices and equip- ment that will make any collection of vessels more environmentally correct, economical and yes, attractive to prospective charterers. In this edition, it means whatever I say it means.

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Separately, and as the closely watched rig count in the U.S. Gulf in the U.S. Gulf continues to drop – dipping below 80 percent utilization as we went to press – so, too, go the rates for offshore supply vessels. As such, and if you operate a workboat in this climate, you can probably be forgiven if SATCOM, Software and water treatment technology (of all things) aren’t necessarily the number one thing on your plate when you sit down at your desk each morning. That said; all three items, at one time or another, someday probably will.

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It is clear – at least to me – that the brown water, workboat market has grown up considerably over the course of the last two decades. It already represents 99 percent of our commercial merchant marine in terms of hulls alone. But the sector has also embraced a technology boom that has its ves- sels literally bristling with leading edge equipment that, in some cases, eclipses that which is happen- ing on the blue water, deep draft side. Beyond this reality, a more sophisticated and better educated mariner is now the rule and not the exception in this sector. Management software naturally comes along with all of that forward thinking, and the workboat world is steadily embracing its arrival.

That story begins on page 30.

Operators and workboats can collect all the data that they want, but if that information isn’t synchronized and shared across multiple internal stakeholders in near real time, it probably isn’t doing anyone much good. Nor will it optimize your bottom line. For that reason, it may be