# Digitalizing Maritime Containers Shipping Companies: Impacts on Their Processes
## 2 Approach and Methodology  
Since the hypothesis that needs to be proved is that the impacts of maritime containers shipping companies' digitalization is different per application and that these applications can be grouped or clustered according to their impact in the company's operations, the first step was performing an impact analysis. The impact analysis performed in this work required two inputs: the maritime containers shipping companies' Business Process Model (BPMo) and the digital applications used for digitalizing the BPMo. The lack of published process models for the companies that are the object of this research has required the development of a BPMo. The developed BPMo departed from the Cross-Industry version of the Process Classification Framework\(\copyright\)[14; 15] from the American Productivity & Quality Centre (APQC) since there is no version for maritime shipping companies. Figure 1 has the \"look and feel\" from the APQC, which was used as a starting process model. A first version of the business processes for maritime container shipping companies has been generated by tailoring these cross-industry business processes, taking advantage of the following assets:  
* The most relevant handbooks on maritime economics [16; 17];
* Published research that includes parts of the business processes for a maritime container shipping company [9; 18];
* The UN Convention on International Multimodal Transport [19]. The content validation of this model was performed by using an inter-judge validation process. The experts that participated in this validation were:  
Figure 1: APQC cross-industry process classification framework. * Three Spanish Maritime Transportation Shipping Companies, including the participation of C-level executives and vice-presidents from these companies. * A Spanish logistics management company. * An expert in the sector from Universidad Politecnica de Madrid (UPM). The content validation of this business process model was performed by using an inter-judge validation process. This method has been extensively used specially for validating survey questions. This work makes use of it, extending the concept of content validation beyond the one related with questions from a survey. The quantification of the agreement was calculated using the content validity ratio (\(CVR\)) developed by [PERSON] [20]:  
\[CVR=(ne-N/2)(N/2)\]  
where \(ne\) = number of judges indicating the question as \"essential\" (in this research, \(ne\) = number of judges indicating the modification of the BPMo as \"essential\"); and \(N\) = total number of judges (in this work, \(N\) = 5). [PERSON] considered the values of \(CVR\) included in Table 1 as the ones necessary for item validation. Therefore, the method required the agreement amongst judges on the validity and clarity of the model. The next step was building the list of digital application; three sources have been used for building such a list:  
* Applications coming from academic research. These are the ones coming from the aforementioned _Sensors_ paper from the team of this research. * Applications that are already available in the market. This list has been built using the newsletter from the market. Some of them are: www.maritime-executive.com, www.vpoglobal.com, www.thedigitalship.com, www.drnv.com, www.shippingandfreightresource.com, and www.wartsila.com. It includes not only market-available applications but also others that are inspired by market-available ones. The range of dates for this analysis has been between March 2018 and September 2021. * Applications coming from other industries. The search for these applications was completed via the internet between June 2021 and September 2021. The list of applications was confronted to the aforementioned BPMo for maritime container shipping companies in order to qualify the impact on each process, the requirements for the implementation of the app, and the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that will measure the impact of the implementation. The digitalization of the processes implies their redesign.