Portfolio RM

Introduction

Maritime transport is essential to the world's economy and over 90% of the world's trade is carried by sea. About 10 billion tons of goods are shipped each year by the >$100 billion maritime transport industry. The global fleet involved in international trade amounts to 50,000 ships in various sizes and categories. The most common type of vessels is Bulk-carriers (dry products such as iron ore, grain, and coal) followed by Tankers (wet products such as oil and fuel products). To facilitate trading, Ship-brokers intermediate in an estimated 90% of all Bulk-carrier freight transactions. Vast resources are spent on manual structuring and filtering of information and it is common for market participants to receive up to 5000 emails per day displaying trading opportunities. Bulk-carrier freight and its neighboring Tanker market are both very large industries in their very early days of digitalization. Several of the key trends within the Bulk-carrier shipping market supports the adaptation of Enqlare’s solution offering.

Assignment

Create an MVP(minimum viable product) to proof the concept to investors.

Research

I started out by researching how trade is done in the Bulk-carrier and Tanker shipping market. Wich parties are all involved and how do they translate to our MVP. Which specific software is used by these parties? Are agreements made on the go or is there a standard? I found that the price agreements were discussed between brokers and not the parties who ordered or had to ship the product. It seemed there was a lack of transparency. I took interviews with people in the industry and one the founders of Enqlare. I discovered that communication is mostly done over yahoo email and phone. This bit surprised me thinking about the scale of the market. Contracts were mostly handled by legal departments or companies who specialized in these type of contracts. Could we create more transparency by bringing these two important elements of trading in just one place?

Yahoo email came out as one of the main communication channals.

Product Research & Analysis

After some of the processes had become clear to me it was time for a workshop. The two founders of Enqlare living in Sweden came to our office in the Netherlands.
Prediscussed over email and skype we decided our focus would be on:

Shaping personas based on pre-discussed roles.
Discovering the Needs & Wants of these personas.
Mapping out their user journey.
Translate first findings into Wireframes.

As in the examples below, we started with discovering the needs and wants for each persona. Cluster these together and add solutions to them. After this start by adding functionalities.

We all grabbed a functionality and sketched one out. These sketches are added next to the persona.

Here are we discussing the results and where to go from here.

Design

The workshop gave us a good insight into how we can connect the processes together. We decided to sketch out more functionalities and started wireframing the ones we agreed on.

Sketching is the easiest way of visualizing our ideas and validating them. On the left sketch, we trying to visualize how Joe the shipbroker keeps track of and starts a trade. On the right sketch, we thinking about how we can add gamification to this process.

First iterations of wireframes after the sketches for Joe the shipbroker.

MVP

We reached a point that we could see it working for a MVP. The wireframes and style mockups were implemented in a Mendix application. When this was completed, I moved on to a new project. The team of Enqlare managed to get funding and kept developing on the application. It is great to see how their vision in 2016 is becoming a reality!

The long term goal of Enqlare is to establish a leading and disruptive platform in the Bulk-carrier and Tanker shipping market to support the selected Brokers management of all types of transaction contracts and their related commercial and operational activities.
Fredrik Tham - CTO Enqlare