Maritime Risk Management Explained 

Shipping organisations are constantly faced with substantial risks in protecting shipping, crew, vessels and operations around the world, as well as the environment. 

 There are enormous financial, human, and environmental costs of suffering a disaster at sea. This means maritime companies must always look to improve their safety and reduce the risk of catastrophes.  Maritime risk management aims to identify, analyse, and assess risks, to reduce their impact or – best of all – avoid them altogether.  

What is Maritime Risk Management? 

Maritime risk management is the process of identifying, assessing, and controlling hazards and threats that can arise during ship operations. The goal is to minimize the likelihood of incidents and accidents at sea, protecting personnel, cargo, the environment, and the vessel itself. 

Why is maritime risk management so important?  

Effective maritime risk management can not only keep your crew, cargo, vessels, and the environment safe, but also improve your bottom line. Preventing major catastrophes at sea saves money, time, and lives. 

At HiLo, we believe it’s the cornerstone of a safe and efficient maritime environment, and is key to all our tools and services. 

What is the most effective maritime risk management approach? 

The most effective maritime risk management is proactive and ongoing.  

The key is to continually find and resolve minor issues as early as possible, before they become significant. This will reduce the risk of you suffering costly disasters at sea.  

This requires:

• Regular maritime risk assessments: Proactively identifying potential hazards based on the specific voyage, cargo, weather conditions etc. 
• Maritime risk prioritisation: Evaluating the likelihood and severity of each identified risk, and the damage it could cause. 
• Maritime risk mitigation: Strategies to avoid or minimize the likelihood or impact of risks. These can include improvements to procedures, training, equipment, route planning, safety protocols, and operational practices and emergency procedures. 
• Monitoring: Keep checking the effectiveness of your maritime risk management strategies in keeping your crew and vessels safe 
• Reviewing and adapting: As you gain more data and knowledge about your ongoing risks, adapt your plans. Use lessons learned from past incidents to improve future maritime risk management and find and resolve issues more quickly 
• How can you improve maritime risk management? 

There are 2 aspects to improving your maritime risk management strategies include: 

Technology: Utilise navigation and weather forecasting tools to make informed future-focused decisions. 

• Data-driven insights: Utilise tools like HiLo’s Risk Hawk to gain insights from audits (including SIRE, CDI and PSC) and prepare crews for potential issues at specific ports.  
• Communication and collaboration: Invest in platforms facilitating communication and collaboration between shore-side staff and crew members for efficient risk management. 
• A risk maritime management plan (RMP): This plan should outline your organisation’s approach to risk management, including procedures for risk identification, assessment, mitigation, monitoring, and review.  
• Utilising maritime risk assessment tools like HiLo’s Zenith for self-assessments (TMSA, Dry BMS, OVMSA), to identify gaps and areas for improvement.  
• Implementing clear and consistent procedures for all operations to minimize the chance of human error.  
• Incident investigation: Learn from incidents and near misses by conducting thorough investigations and implementing corrective actions.  

Benchmarking: Look to industry best practices and benchmark your performance against other companies to identify areas for improvement.  

You can achieve all of these maritime risk management improvements by using HiLo’s suite of tools and services to:  

• Streamline risk assessment processes.  
• Enhance crew safety awareness. 
• Improve compliance with regulations.  
• Optimise operational efficiency.  

What is most important in maritime risk management?

There are 2 aspects of maritime risk management that are absolutely vital if you want to improve your safety at sea. 

The first is establishing and maintaining a maritime safety culture – one which your whole organisation accepts, understands and follows: 

Create an environment where from the top down safety is a core value, everyone is encouraged to report hazards, and lessons learned from incidents are openly discussed and acted upon. 

Invest in comprehensive training for crew members on risk identification, assessment, and mitigation strategies. 

Encourage open communication of safety concerns and near misses to identify potential problems before they escalate. 

This all helps provide the data to identify future risks. 

The second is a proactive approach to maritime risk management. Companies must ensure they are looking forward, using all available data, models and analysis, in order to identify and prevent future risks to people, ships and the environment.  

This can only be achieved by gathering data from vessels and organisations across the industry, to create accurate and detailed maritime risk management predictive models.  

This proactive modelling is far more effective than just analysing previous individual incidents from within your own fleet. However, Shipping Risk Management companies shipping companies have not previously been able to achieve this forward-looking maritime risk management.  They have simply not had the data available to look forward rather than back. Shipping companies only had access to their own internal data, which was unlikely to give clear indications of future issues. In short, they did not have enough information to develop predictive risk analysis.  

Without sufficient data to spot trends and model the future, there is little chance of pinpointing and mitigating future risks successfully. This has, up to now, been the biggest failing in maritime risk management. It has meant key threats have often been missed, resulting in major disasters. 

This is where HiLo changes the game.  

What is different about HiLo maritime risk management?

At HiLo, we have revolutionised maritime risk management. By using big data analytics from across our fleet of more than 2,500 vessels, we deliver the most proactive, future-focused, effective risk analysis the industry has ever seen.  

We have created a whole ecosystem of cause and effect, which allows shipping companies to see where issues are likely to put their vessels in danger. Our trend analysis warns you ahead of time, giving you the chance to respond before an incident occurs. 

We can automatically collect and standardise all your data so we can completely understand your maritime operations. We then feed this info into our world-leading statistical models, which can tell you the biggest future risks you face – and how to prevent them. 

In short, you can stop issues in their tracks before they cause major disasters.  

Understanding ‘risk’ and ‘frequency’ in maritime risk management 

Risk and frequency are both important for maritime risk management, but in different ways. It is crucial to prioritise your resources so you implement the most time-critical safety measures first, to best protect your crew, vessels and operations. 

‘Frequency’ simply means how often an event occurs, whereas ‘risk’ considers both the frequency of an incident and how bad the consequences can be. A high-frequency event with minimal consequences is likely to pose a lower risk than a rare event with catastrophic potential.  

Focusing solely on frequency can lead to overlooking potentially disastrous but rare events. For example, a known and frequent but minor engine malfunction might be easily addressed, but the risk of a less frequent major engine failure might not be noticed. The latter could have catastrophic consequences. 

This is why effective maritime risk assessment is crucial. It provides a holistic view, allowing you to prioritise efforts based on the potential impact of an event.  

HiLo’s solutions employ maritime risk assessment techniques that consider both the likelihood and potential consequences of incidents. They help you find and focus on solving the risks that pose the greatest threat.  

Why should you choose HiLo for maritime risk management?

HiLo offers a suite of tools and services, like Risk Hawk and Zenith, designed to empower shipping companies to implement robust risk management practices and achieve their safety and operational goals.  

We go beyond traditional methods to truly understand your unique operations and potential hazards. Our experts analyse your existing data, risk assessments, and processes, painting a clear picture of where vulnerabilities lie.  

 Our customers have saved over $130 million in the past year by avoiding incidents, and have prevented over 2000 incidents across the HiLo fleet.  

Contact HiLo today to learn more about how we can help you take your marine risk management to the next level.