Many companies in the shipping industry have already started their digital journey by automating data collection from their vessels. This connected mode of operations introduces a new level of transparency to onboard operations, but also has a downside – namely the ever-increasing amounts of information produced that is far beyond the capacity of any single person to process. What is needed to make data even more useful is a way to automatically process gathered information and provide insights and feasible scenarios going forward. With this kind of smart operation, a vessel's automated data collection system uses cloud-based technologies to automatically analyze data in real time. Performance analytics are based on machine learning.