Starting Out In The Maritime Scene

The maritime sector is notoriously slow in adopting new technologies. For an industry that has been around since man first floated a log in a lake, that is in some ways understandable.

- Ong Xiang Hong

Mariners hold onto tradition in an industry fraught with the peril that Nature herself can unleash upon the ocean.

Even on the administrative side, maritime companies are slow to embrace innovation. For example, many maritime companies still rely on arcane practices, such as using pen and paper to handle all their planning. Alvin Ea, co-founder of Haulio, said, “It’s a challenge for [maritime companies] to even use a software like Microsoft Excel.”

But that’s not to say the maritime industry is stuck in the past—new technology just needs time to prove itself through repeated use (and abuse).

To help shippers connect with hauliers (transport on land), Haulio is a centralised, collaborative platform for the container haulage industry as a haulier-to-haulier portal that is built to serve the hauliers (and shippers) better. Through better optimization of resources, Haulio can better distribute the workload among hauliers, who traditionally communicate on a piecemeal, ad-hoc basis with shippers.

To date, Haulio has an outreach of more than 75 per cent of Singapore’s hauliers, comprising of more than 2,000 prime movers and 20,000 trailers.

Vicknesh Pillay, managing partner of venture capitalist TNB Aura Fund added, “As the maritime industry is characterised by its heavily manual and largely paper-based processes, digitisation is the key to unlocking further innovation such as automation, data analytics, and optimisation. It is precisely due to the inefficiencies of traditional processes that we see massive opportunities ahead.”