How marine specialist Van Oord is taking a deep dive into data to ensure smooth sailing for its vessels

Marine contractor Van Oord operates about 60 vessels, many of which acquire high volumes of complex data. The business became acutely aware of the need for a data science specialism 10 years ago, to get the best value out of its fleet and more recently support its ocean health strategy.

Gerben de Boer, Innovation Discipline Manager at Van Oord, was put in charge of launching its data lab department. One of the tasks that came with that remit was Business Intelligence (BI), to ensure the information gathered via this advanced analysis ended up at the place where decisions are made. De Boer notes:

Complex Python algorithms are not going to end up at the desk of our decision makers, so you need some kind of interactive visuals in between. Top down, it was decided that we needed to embark on a BI program to translate all these analytics to very ...