Off-shore racing meets biz intelligence

At Rowe’s Wharf on Boston Harbor, 12 steel yachts that weigh 45 tons each are anchored in the sunshine after a nonstop race from Cape Town in the Global Challenge. Onboard the boats, the crews are busy maintaining sails and riggings for the race’s next leg.

Also, there is a lot of rebooting to do.

During the 6,775-mile (10,903-kilometers) leg, and throughout the east to west circumnavigation, navigation relies on computers, satellites and radio waves. Speed and wind conditions are continually measured and presented on digital instruments. Because all 12 boats are identical, the crew and skipper can only compete by making the right decisions. The yachts left the U.K. last Oct. 3, with the leg from Cape Town to Boston the longest of the 30,000 mile race. The fleet sets sail for La Rochelle, France, on June 19, with the finish in U.K. expected in mid-July.

Besides the navigation and communication software carried onboard, every vessel is equipped with a system sold with the pitch: “everything you need for business planning, budgeting, forecasting, financial consolidation, reporting and analysis and performance management.” The IT system is meant to allow the crew to make better sail plan decisions based on previous performance and to help them decide, for instance, which combination of sails will make the boat go as fast as possible at any particular moment.

Race rules forbid hooking the software system up with any onboard navigation systems, so the skipper and crew have to enter data manually.

“There’s a real parallel between business performance management and boat performance management,” says Jason Mullins, solutions architect with the business intelligence vendor Applix Inc., a race sponsor based in Westborough, Massachusetts, with facilities in London, where the race application was developed. Mullins wrote the Applix application based on the company’s analytics system called TM1. “It has a lot of analogies. It’s an operational performance management system and comes down to that you’re measuring the performance of the boat over a huge amount of metrics in order to improve.”

Or as Dee Caffari, skipper on Imagine it Done, puts it: “If you can’t do as well as you did last time under the same conditions then something is wrong. You always try to increase or at least maintain the same level.”

“The crew are actually getting only relevant data and not data when the boat is surfing down a wave going faster than normal and those kinds of things,” Mullins said, admitting that the manual approach also saved him from another technical challenge.

The data entered into the system, via Excel, would typically include which tack the boat has, true and apparent wind speed and angle, sea conditions, and speed through the water. The more data that is collected, the more accurate the performance history becomes.

The crew can also build limited “what if” sail-plan scenarios: How would the boat perform if right now we use a spinnaker (the balloon sail) instead of a gennaker (slightly smaller than the spinnaker and more stable)?

Today, more or less advanced digital monitoring systems are generally common among racing sailors. However, in the Global Challenge any automatic logging or monitoring software other than Applix is not allowed. Competitors are allowed to use the preinstalled programs on the three PCs onboard, including Microsoft Corp.’s Office.

Vaio yacht crew member Ylva Johansson, from Sweden, said that her skipper and crew mates use Excel to make their own calculations of how the boat performs in the Challenge race. “But that’s something you don’t discuss outside your team,” she said secretively.

As in any sport, knowledge gained through experience is an important competitive advantage and that knowledge is often guarded. Inventions in seamanship and navigation methods were kept secret back in the days when sail ships transported cargo.

Many still find sailing intuitive rather than about facts and figures.

“You build up an idea of how the boat sounds and feels when she’s going very well,” says Georg Ell, a crew member on Imagine it Done.

Ell helped Mullins develop the application in London before the race’s start and is responsible for the use of it on his boat. Ell mainly uses it as another source of advice. “For example; if you have a feeling that we’ve sailed better in this angle in this wind condition, you might go to this and say, ‘Does my feeling correlate with the monitored data?’ “

The best real-time performance indicator is having a competitor within sight, Ell said. “On the fourth leg on the Southern Ocean we actually match-raced Barclays for five days. That really helped us drive performance up to another level,” he said.

For Jason Mullins, the project has meant more than just coding another application. He is hooked on sailing and will be present for the race’s finish, watching from a sailboat. “I had no experience what so ever of sailing before the involvement in this project,” he said. “Now I sail twice a week on the Thames and have gained my first two dinghy sailing levels.”