SMI PODCAST: Exclusive Interview with Niklas Weidmann & Narayan Venkatesh, Tilla Technologies

I just want to sort of get a bit of an aspect there on the physical aspect of it as a platform.

But coming back to budgets, I think this is quite important because when you're talking about the status quo, it talks about whether the industry looks at all of this in a strategic way.

When you look at current budgets, how well do companies actually understand where that money goes? And I think when you talk about status quo, it's accepting what it is is what it is.

How does that need to change, would you say? Is it a mindset change? And what's going to force that change within the industry? Nick, do you want to have a go at that? And then, Narayan, maybe get your views?

100%.

It's a very good question, actually.

And it's something that we have been thinking about quite a bit, actually.

And I think that the status quo was that, of course, we have a budget.

And the budget today references one headline number.

It's an X euro or dollar spent on crew change.

And what very often is not included in the budget is the cost of being reactive, right? And this is, of course, very much also linked to the true change use case and itself, because you have to react on a short notice.

There are last minute rebookings.

The vessel might be delayed by one day and that's why you have to take a flight that isn't the best flight.

Nevertheless, these crewing batches today are reported as outcomes, not as decisions.

And we believe that until you can really see the decisions that lead to the outcome of the budget, you cannot really manage the budget.

And that's exactly where we are starting with Tiller.

We are looking at making trade-offs visible.

We're looking at uncovering decision profiles and therefore then moving this entire budget decision on a more strategic level than it is today.

I would like to echo what Nick said.

So over the past decades, I think crewing teams and crewing leadership have had to just accept that one big number.

And their only ways to really optimize the budget was to adjust the way the organization is set up, improve their vendors, which would be travel partners.

but again, with limited sort of ability to create flexibility there in terms of costs.

Same with port agency costs, where there was not much of visibility or options available for the crewing leadership.

So they again had to fairly accept their limitations in terms of optimizing these costs.

And now with Tila as a platform, again, We're able to provide all of this visibility back to them.