Mizzen Digital
A revolutionary platform to reshape the maritime industry…
In line with our endeavor to highlight some of the noteworthy startups thriving across the entrepreneurial ecosystem, we decided to focus on Mizzen Digital’s triumph tale at the forefront of this edition. To cover the length and breadth of the business portfolio, we happened to arrange a virtual meeting with the leadership panel of Mizzen Digital which comprises of Capt. Sandeep D’Silva who is the CEO, Chetan Mehrotra who is the CHRO and Shivanshu Sharma who is the Chief Operations Officer. Let’s dive into the narrative prepared as per the conversation held with the trio
The preface
The maritime industry thrives on accessing reliable information for making well-considered, data-driven decisions. The positive impact that this aspect has on businesses in the industry, made Mizzen Digital come up with a solution that enables management of the life cycle of a voyage across vessel segments, just at the click of a button.
The platform formulated by it is an intuitive, modular platform that leverages 21st Century paradigms to track details and costs of your commercial operations. Owing to the organization’s service portfolio, businesses can avoid mistakes while keeping track of the financial picture. The platform offers a complete solution for managing a vessel’s journey over its entire life cycle.
Port cost control is possible from any location in the world because of the web-based, user-friendly interface with customizable options. It is a cutting-edge digital solution that supports in-the-moment decision-making, cuts across organizational silos, and creates an environment conducive to business. They offer management services for the voyage, port expenses, associated financial transactions, administration of the voyage, including route and weather optimization, help with bunkering, and clientspecific customizations to meet your company’s demands.
Additionally, VM Lite, Bunker Assist and Optimization Engine are their upcoming products that would create a whole lot of a difference in the way maritime sector manages its operations.
What gives them a leading edge?
The maritime industry thrives on accessing reliable information for making well-considered, data-driven decisions. The positive impact that this aspect has on businesses in the industry, made Mizzen Digital come up with a solution that enables management of the life cycle of a voyage acoss vessel segments, just at the click of a button. The platform formulated by it is an intuitive, modular platform that leverages 21st Century paradigms to track details and costs of your commercial operations.
Owing to the organization’s service portfolio, businesses can avoid mistakes while keeping track of the financial picture. The platform offers a complete solution for managing a vessel’s journey over its entire life cycle. Port cost control is possible from any location in the world because of the web-based, user-friendly interface with customizable options.
It is a cutting-edge digital solution that supports in-the-moment decision-making, cuts across organizational silos, and creates an environment conducive to business. They offer management services for the voyage, port expenses, associated financial transactions, administration of the voyage, including route and weather optimization, help with bunkering, and client-specific customizations to meet your company’s demands.
Additionally, VM Lite, Bunker Assist and Optimization Engine are their upcoming products that would create a whole lot of a difference in the way maritime sector manages its operations
The approach Mizzen Digital always ensures is to keep customer centricity as the core business philosophy. To allow customers’ businesses to thrive, they offer a wide range of products and services that allow them to focus on what matters most to them: growing their business and making a profit! The idea is to enable and empower different players across the industry with their standalone portfolio.
Believing that industrial benefits lead to benefits for all the stakeholders, they find their success in the customer’s success only. “We are not vendors or service providers, we work as an extension of our customers, the belief being that we win when our customers win. All products and services that we offer aim at improving efficiency, effectiveness, and profitability of our customers, rather than focused internally, as is evident from our offerings,” says Sandeep DaSilva.
Eradicating mundane, time-consuming tasks while freeing up valuable resources, their product and service portfolio allows teams to automate repetitive tasks like data input, allowing you to save time and energy while accomplishing more. The platform offers a wealth of reporting features and analytical tools to help ship owners, commercial operators, and charterers make better decisions based on the performance of the vessel.
The platform is a simple, cloud-native gateway that enables optimizing the processes for vessel voyage performance and disbursement accounting without compromising data and privacy. From keeping in touch with ship agents and suppliers to controlling one’s contractual commitments, they never fail to offer what is needed. The motive is not only to provide efficiency but peace of mind too. Hence, they provide proper cost management services that are specifically efficient and personalized to meet each client’s requirements accordingly.
The specialized teams at the company are able to bring years of extensive experience in handling agents, vendors, and other stakeholders. They also believe that maintaining control over one’s disbursement procedures is essential for one’s firm. Customers may use the platform to do just that, staying up to date with all the information they require while minimizing their costs.
They want to democratize technology by making it available to all stakeholders and their creative pricing model is reflective of that. An application ecosystem that covers every aspect of shipping operations significantly reduces time spent, providing teams with more time and space to focus on the firm’s more crucial and challenging PnL management duties.
Common challenges Mizzen Digital addresses
Since its inception, the company has no doubt created intrinsic value for its targeted customer base. A few of the common challenges they eradicate via their service offerings are-
• Operation in silos
• Reduce the amount of money that shipping firms spend on various goods and services that only partially solve their problem.
• Stand-alone software solutions that disrupt workflow and cause productivity loss.
• System integrations that are either absent or challenging to accomplish.
• Repetitive manual data entry that requires a lot of labor is required.
• Non-standard techniques for gathering and storing data.
• Digitization at source of crucial infomation.
• Multiple communication channels.
• Lack of appropriate and adequate data for decision-making and lost productivity that cost businesses thousands of dollars.
The targeted segments
The application ecosystem at Mizzen Digital is created with the diversity in the shipping industry in mind, and they are able to provide services to all enterprises across all market segments. They are able to provide technical managers, ship managers, chartering companies, and brokerage firms with services that optimize internal operations by giving teams access to tools that enable in-depth analytics, trends, and P&L optimization for the company. Applications for ships in the liner, oil tanker, gas carrier, bulk carrier, special cargo, offshore, and chemical industries have been developed.
Keeping abreast of the market changes
When asked what allows them to keep up with the market trends, the trio responded, “The shipping markets are quite dynamic, therefore in order to keep up, we have partnered with service providers to provide essential information that keeps us informed of developments affecting shipping companies, fleets, and cargoes around the world. We also have representatives in the APAC, American, and European regions that help us with market trends as well as with inputs on services and service suppliers. We are also reaching out in the west, with developmenting representations and brand outreach.”
The role of R&D
The company’s growth depends heavily on Research and Development, and they regularly consider market and customer input on the demands and requirements of the sector. The R&D team interprets the comments as an improvement or adjustment to the apps based on customer and market requirements. They continue to participate in the cycle to improve the system on a daily basis since this is an ongoing process. The R&D and improvements enable them to improve the application, which results in significant time savings and financial benefits to the customers and their PnL (profit and loss) statement.
Cultural codes and ethics
The cultural codes they strictly follow comprise a few postulates such as-
• Daring and innovative attitude
• Thriving on complexity and enjoying the process of slicing through it.
• Collaborating and succeeding together
• Having faith in the capabilities of colleagues, clients, and competitors
• Striving to dream, challenge, change, and achieve
• Being limitless thinkers who are persistently focused on questioning, iterating and building a better product.
• A sheer obsession for ensuring exceptional customer experiences
• Making customer success the foremost priority
• A deep understanding and respect for diversity, the dignity of individuals, and the laws of the land that they operate in.
• ‘My word, My bond, My Oath of Honor. I’ll never settle for anything less than perfection – the success mantra at Mizzen Digital
• Delivering on promises and taking pride in making things happen in a right and consistent manner
“We strongly think that a content and happy workforce is the key to our success, and this is one of our core values. Our policies and procedures are in line with the fact that employees are an essential component of our foundation. We are committed to fostering an environment that empowers our staff to manage their careers. Our team is what makes things happen, so, as leaders, it is our duty to facilitate.
When everyone on the team is committed to the organization’s goals and mission, magic happens. We are happy to provide our employees with early responsibilities and educational opportunities since we want them to build a career with Mizzen Digital. We firmly endeavor to create an environment, where people enjoy working, can prioritise work-life balance, have career mobility, get recognized and rewarded for good work,” enunciated the leaders.
Impact and accomplishments
Throughout its business journey, the company has been able to create a huge impact on the targeted sector. A few of the worth mentioning facts in this direction are dynamically changing market and keeping up with the changes, looking ahead and planning strategically for the future, conceptualizing, identifying, and building the right systems and processes, considering the right set of skills and attitude both with internal and external stakeholders and facilitating the change through conducting positive dialogue with clients on the change management process.
Moreover, a few of the milestones that they take pride in are as follows-
• Discovered a persistent issue in the field and developed a strategy to solve it
• To give a solution that addresses all issues, digitizes data, and delivers robust analytics, procedures were reorganized and reformed utilizing cutting-edge technology.
• Ingenious product and application development and implementation
• Excellent product-market fit and 100 percent client satisfaction
• There has been only positive feedback from clients or potential clients.
• Every 15 days, new services and improvements are developed and launched.
• Policies for employee empowerment and development
The future outlook
Mizzen Digital envisions itself becoming No.1 go-to technology provider for the shipping sector, offering a one stop shop for all shipping-related issues, allowing both its stakeholders and the sector at large to optimize their operations and gain from their solutions. They want to see the shipping and maritime industry triumph and profit from the inevitable technological transformation that is going to happen, and they are committed to assisting them in staying ahead of the curve.
A token of advice for the entrepreneurs
Everything begins with a thought, a thought that motivates you, lifts your spirits and provides you with energy that follows you wherever you go, a burning drive to innovate, transform, impact, and improve people’s lives as well as businesses. Always take a moment to say hello to your family, friends, and anyone else that helped you out when you needed it most. They are the pillars of support that will keep you going against all adversity.”
Words to convey to the readers…
No dream is achieved overnight; it takes perseverance, hard work, sleepless nights, dedication and, most importantly, focus. If you dream of it, you have to go all out to achieve it; there will be what might seem failures, there will be lows, and there will be days when you hit rock bottom, but the beauty of the journey is that you get up every day and go all out to get it.
We are not saying that it is easy, that you will get it the next day. Hold onto your thoughts, efforts, and dreams because they are already directing you toward a journey you will never forget, and what you accomplish at the end of it will make it all worthwhile. Keep working toward it, and don’t let it slide.
Meet the leadership team
• Capt. Sandeep D’Silva– He has rich professional experience in the Maritime Sector, in leadership roles, having handled senior management responsibilities in reputed Shipping Companies in the Maritime Space. He has extensive experience of working in different roles encompassing General Management, Business Development, Product Management, Customer Support, and Project Management.
Having worked in large established organizations and businesses, as well as entrepreneurial setups, has helped him in understanding different organizational cultures and styles of management. During his stints in the leadership roles in various establishments, he has created new businesses and infrastructure, driven aggressive business expansions, restructured businesses, and architected a successful company turnaround. Starting and establishing businesses, particularly in the Maritime sector, has almost become a second nature to him
• Chetan Mehrotra – He has over 24 years of rich and varied cross industry experience in HR, holding leadership roles in various functions of HR in leading technology & service companies as well as hi-tech process companies.
An HR professional who believes HR can never be divorced from business, and in fact, should be an active partner in business, instead of being a support function, his areas of expertise include Organization building and structuring, Organization effectiveness, developing and deploying scalable HR Process, HR Technology, M&A and Integration and Employee Relations. He has experience in setting up and leading the HR functions during project and stabilizing stages of organizations.
• Shivanshu Sharma – He brings along 16+ years of experience in Shipping with extensive sailing and commercial operations experience. He has extensive experience in Commercial operations and has managed vessels across Oil and Chemical tankers.
Additionally, he brings along his leadership skills and experience in handling large teams, working on organizational PnL with the senior leadership team, various engagement activities and handling independently. Currently, he is working as the COO of the Mizzen Digital team driving the engagements globally in close coordination with the leadership team and core values of the organization.
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