Scrutiny of maritime operators’ ESG performance is intensifying. Financiers, investors, customers and employees all expect to be in the know.
Tanker owner and operator Frontline was looking for “best-in-class” digital solutions to gather data that would bring a more robust understanding of its fleet as part of its decarbonization journey and more energy-efficient, sustainable operations.
Bringing ESG to life
DNV has since 2020 assisted Frontline to fully digitalize their ship performance data, including ESG data, into a digital dashboard on Veracity. Frontline reports performance on various ESG indicators including climate change, air emissions, ecological impact, anti-corruption, employee health and safety, and accident and safety management. This means that they need to gather a lot of data from various sources in different formats.
Gathering this kind of data can be a laborious manual task. Frontline recognizes that trust in the data is key to sustainable progress. DNV’s digital solution automates and streamlines the process of gathering data from multiple sources, aggregating it into a clear, accessible dashboard. This supports performance tracking and communications with stakeholders, inside and outside the business.
A key challenge with ESG performance tracking and reporting is the lack of high-quality data. To get a better understanding of Frontline’s current data management practices and data quality, DNV carried out a data maturity assessment where key improvement areas were identified. By further creating a standardized data schema, they are now able to implement a more streamlined process for both gathering and processing the data, as well as automated data quality checks. In that way, they can at all times know if they can trust the data for efficient decision-making and compliance.
The ambition is to capture high frequency data without human involvement, making reliable real-time data easily accessible and visualizing it in a user-friendly way, which is key to making better decisions and growing a culture where energy optimization has priority.
Lars Pedersen
Chief Technical Officer
Frontline
In addition to using the data to manage ESG risk and reporting today, this data helps Frontline to be prepared for future requirements and to stay competitive. The company already demonstrates in their ESG report for 2021 that they outperformed the IMO trajectories for Annual Efficiency Ratio (AER) and was awarded an A-rating accordingly.
