To reinforce his point, Albiero mentions that as the logistics market steps toward largescale digitalization, a prominent pain-point that persists is data integration. In the physical logistics ecosystem, data is exceedingly heterogeneous, coming in from different sources and “a commercial shipping solution should serve as the backbone of the data to properly calculate and estimate the progress of a business,” notes Albiero. To this end, Swiss-based Singular Point has introduced an innovative chartering and shipping solution, MARiS, to efficiently tackle these growing challenges in the realm of logistics. Besides being a full commercial shipping solution, MARiS has been designed for seamless data integration. The solution’s architecture ensures that integration and adoption are not only available to big selective organizations that can spend significant money but also to the smaller entities in the logistics market. Moreover, MARiS spearheads the market owing to its flexibility of usage, acting as an off-the-shelf solution that enables the implementation of multiple business processes for the same business case, thereby boosting productivity and saving clients considerable money and effort. This, in turn, prevents the standardization of processes on both the vendor and the customer side along with the stalled evolution due to the same. “With MARiS, customers can map their business processes and logic inside the system and not the other way around. We want our customers to be able to express their uniqueness instead of being compelled to implement processes in accordance with our designed solution,” underscores Albiero. One of the key advantages of MARiS is that customers can easily embed future process changes in the system in a matter of days rather than months.

Albiero goes on to mention that most projects fail from a system integration standpoint, which often leads to processing data outside the system resulting in additional layers of data processing and silos. This can be effectively eliminated with the architecture of MARiS whereby data exchange between the front end and business layer is implemented via WEB API CRUD technologies. Designed from ground up as a web-based API application, MARiS' architecture and its unprecedented configurability allow companies and their customers to connect devices, obtain better control, operate faster, and outpace the competition. “One of the main drivers of digitization in the shipping landscape is the electronic devices installed on shipping vessels, aggregating a hoard of data pertaining to measurements inside the vessel every given minute. This staggering amount of data collected from the IoT sensors can be automatically entered and effortlessly integrated with MARiS without any assistance from our end,” explains Albiero. Further, the system can be easily configured to consume any new data automatically accumulated through the IoT appliances. “The architecture of MARiS allows unlimited data integration and automatic processes as soon as the data is entered into the system.”

As a blockchain-enabled shipping solution, every MARiS Object is embedded with SPEAR (Singular Point Enterprise Architecture) functionalities, generating a highly automated and self-executable MARiS Atom. “The functionalities of MARiS Atom are similar to that of a Blockchain Smart Contract. If we exclude the “distributed” nature of a Smart Contract, typical of a blockchain implementation, a MARiS Atom can be programmed to automate logic based events exactly as a Smart Contract,” explains Albiero. However, while a Smart Contract, in its purest form, is a monolithic logic that needs to be reprogrammed with every new event, a MARiS Atom can be reprogrammed on the fly. Thanks to SPEAR architecture! MARiS as a blockchain enabler in the shipping and logistics market can create multiple Smart Contracts in different blockchain networks linked to a single MARiS Atom and enrich them with proprietary dynamic data not shared within the blockchain network. MARiS can read Smart Contract data or execute MARiS Atom automated function at Smart Contract event through WEB API.

For shortening the learning curve, Singular Point’s MARiS University offers clients a comprehensive training to unleash the complete power of MARiS, equipping them to configure the system on their own without having to rely on cumbersome and expensive external configurations. Singular Point is currently conducting a number of demos of MARiS to potential customers after presenting it in Geneva last year. Striding ahead, the company envisions integrating MARiS with MATLAB to focus on voyage optimization and planning.

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