From side-by-side comparison to pool-wide trust

Profile

Hartmann runs a multi-owner shipping pool, with vessels in deep-sea trade, governed by external verifiers and reporting to multiple owners. Its Director of Pool Management Operations, Jayant Singh, is an eight-year Coach user who has run the platform across three organizations, including the Hafnia fleet during an earlier tenure.

The situation

When Jayant joined Hartmann, the fleet ran on a different vendor for performance and routing. He brought something almost no buyer can: he had personally run Coach and the previous platform side by side, in the same organization, for years. On the tanker side the fleet had been on Coach; on the dry side, the previous platform. He had watched both systems read the same vessels, the same data, the same trades, and he had formed a clear, evidence-based view.

Three problems repeated with the previous platform. Validation of emissions and performance data was a paid add-on rather than a default capability. Hull-performance reporting cost extra on top of that. And even after the fees, the speed-performance figures routinely failed to track operational reality, including vessels a year away from their next renewal showing implausible speed percentages, with no clear explanation when the account team was pressed.

The user experience lagged too. Basic operator features, such as traffic-light prioritization so the morning view shows where to focus, had sat on the previous vendor's roadmap for more than two years. The platform did offer weather routing, but only as a paid add-on the pool had not subscribed to, so masters managed storm decisions across separate tools, and there were episodes where vessels were routed into developing weather.

Pool operations across multiple owners need a single source of validated data that holds up under a charterer's scrutiny and a verifier's review. Add-on fees for the validation that should sit at the core of any reporting tool, plus performance data the account team could not defend, was not built for that.

The evaluation

Hartmann switched mid-year and structured the transition as an overlap: both systems running on the same vessels long enough to compare the verified outputs directly against the verifier's own returns. This was the part Jayant pushed hardest on. He wanted the evidence on the table before the pool committed to either system.

Master-side input was treated as a hard input to the decision. The feedback was clear and unanimous: Coach was easier to report into, the workflow produced fewer reporting errors, and the time spent fighting the platform dropped. With the tanker vessels Jayant had brought already running on Coach, the comparison was apples to apples.

Validated data moved from a paid add-on to an included capability. The same 120-point validation that had been a separate line item under the previous arrangement ran on every vessel's data from day one with Coach, with no separate contract and no separate price. Coach's outputs went to the verifier, the verifier's validated reports came back, and the two matched exactly. No reconciliation cycle, no defensive correspondence.

The pool then entered Coach's pooling system: data validated by a third party, distributed equally across owners, with every owner seeing numbers that had already passed the same checks. Transparency stopped being an internal claim and became a structural feature of how the pool operated.

“It's functional. It's the support. It's the ingenuity the system provides, all of that while being a simple, usable tool. That's the essence.”

The outcome

The outcomes describe a different shape of operations rather than a list of cost-savings metrics. The interview that produced this case study did not reach for numbers, and none have been added. What Jayant volunteered was specific operational reality.

• •Verifier reports match Coach outputs exactly. There is no reconciliation cycle between what Hartmann submits and what the verifier returns.
• •No counterparty has challenged the data Hartmann has shared since the switch.
• •The pool runs on shared truth: every owner sees the same third-party-validated numbers, distributed equally.
• •Master-side workflow is materially easier, with fewer reporting mistakes on board.
• •Weather routing has shifted from various onboard tools, sometimes routing into the storm, to a two-way conversation with shore-based meteorologists watching the wider fleet.
• •Operator features like traffic-light prioritization were in place from the first login, the same features that took the previous vendor years to reach the drawing board.

The hull that should not have fouled

One vessel had just left dry dock with a fully blasted hull and a fresh top-shelf SPC silicone coating, supplier guarantees in place. After a 25-day stay in tropical-water ports, the technical team did not anticipate a fouling risk. Three days into the next voyage out of Guyana, Coach's performance manager personally reached out to flag a significant drop in the vessel's speed-percentage trend, and the need to plan an underwater inspection quickly.

The inspection at the next port confirmed significant macrofouling. Without reliable performance monitoring and that early call, the fouling might not have surfaced until a much later stage. The early warning gave Hartmann documented evidence at the earliest stage, which strengthened its warranty claim with the coating supplier. A commercial outcome the data delivered without anyone asking for it.

Eight years, same foundations

Jayant has used Coach across three organizations, through the Kongsberg acquisition, and across two segments, tanker and now pool. Coach has grown from five people to more than fifty over those years, and the platform has grown with it, but the foundations on screen are the same. As he puts it, it still feels like working with a small, focused team that believes in what it is building.