Q&A: Jason Aristides OpenTug CEO outlines push to improve barge efficiency through data and AI

JA:  I  have a background in both software development, finance, and marine operations. 

WJ: At which college did you get all that? 

JA: I went to CU Boulder ,and my marine operations college was not actually formally at school. It was working with some of the best maritime companies on the West Coast. 

 So I worked at Foss Maritime, Kurt Maritime and Saltchuk, which is a holding company for FOSS and many other groups, where I was very inspired by what individuals can achieve in the maritime industry. And I think that there is so much opportunity for innovation if people who are ready to work hard and think big can apply their ideas to the barge industry, both coastal and inland. 

WJ: You’ve talked about using all your products to squeeze the inefficiencies out of the barge business. It’s already cost effective compared to other modes, on a per mile basis, on a per ton basis. But anytime there’s unused trips, there’s more efficiency to be achieved. So how do your products do that? And what do your customers tell you about the way they’ve been using them? 

 JA: So when we’re talking about efficiency specifically, I see two major categories. One of them is information flow inefficiency. There are inefficiencies created because people are unable to get the information about when a barge is going to arrive, or is a lock closed down and you’re planning on sending a barge. There is a major gap in the information provided to shippers, terminals, fleets, and even other carriers that could help prevent delays. So a lot of what we’re trying to do is specifically use information and streamline information flow. terminals, carriers, shippers, specifically around reducing terminal delays, reducing inefficiencies that occur because you didn’t know a lock was closing. 
Along with arrival time visibility, because where you see a lot of delays occurring that are not locks are at terminals. So the terminal doesn’t know exactly when a barge is arriving. They might not be able to plan to get it in just in time or furthermore, you are just unaware that certain third parties like an inspector or a tankerman, if they don’t know when the barge is gonna arrive, everybody stops and waits until all the parties are there.
And beyond that, if a scheduler doesn’t know how long they’ll likely have to wait to get into the terminal, they’ll send the barge too early, and you create more and more backups. So specifically on information flow inefficiency, we see that creating a lot of different delays, both at the terminals, also unplanned, disruptions like weather locks, et cetera. And then beyond that, there’s backhaul. And empty reposition inefficiencies because people  are making decisions about which barge should cover a specific load. We’re helping focus on enabling those users to capture their demand. 
We help them prioritize which Jobs  they need to cover today, and then we look across all of the assets in their portfolio and help optimize which barge should cover the job considering cleaning, wind, weather, and locks in between where that asset is and where the order is, along with the schedule what that asset is supposed to do next. If we’re able to help carriers and shippers optimize which assets they’re using for a given order, then you know, you really cut down on potential idle time if we can get readily data driven. these things are things people are trying to do today manually, and what we’ve done is we’ve focused working with the stakeholders, pulling in as much data as possible so that they can now do it a lot easier.   

WJ: So Jason, you used the phrase “just in time,” which is well known to logistics providers in other modes, but isn’t often applied to barging. And you’re mentioning things that be controlled by human beings, like scheduling and terminal use and efficiency of information, and also some things that can’t, that are not so much in control, like weather and water levels and lock closures. How close do you think barging can come to a “just in time” effectiveness, maybe not completely but closer? 

 JA: Yeah, I mean, you’ll never be necessarily just in time a hundred percent of the time, but I think we can get just in time like 80% of the time, if that makes sense. As long as we’re getting correctly reported closures and maintenance of locks, dams, we can forecast the weather to a degree and water levels to a degree.
So even if there are Closures that we can’t necessarily predict or fix, we can do our best to highlight them to whoever needs to plan that. So if a lock is closed down on a waterway that only has one route, then ultimately you’re not gonna be able to get through. But as long as you know that enough in advance, you can plan around it.
You can still achieve closer to “just in time.” It’s not an easy task, but it’s definitely achievable. The way technology has come today, it’s something that people will eventually get on board with because everybody should make theoretically more money if they can do more turns and it becomes easier to ship by barge.
We want more and more people coming to the barge industry. Because it’s becoming easier for them to be able to ship by barge and also improve the quality of life for the people who are managing the barges 

 WJ: In some of your other podcasts and interviews you almost are acting as an ambassador for the barge industry to other logistics providers. And even though there’s farther to go with efficiency in the barge industry. It will automatically make their operations greener just by if they’re able to switch to barge for part of their route, they will be saving ton-miles and saving money and saving carbon emissions. 

JA: Certainly that’s always, you know, top of mind from time to time. Everybody is more excited, I think, about optimizing their commercial operations. Because that’s what you feel the most immediate impact. But I definitely think over time the green component is a more and more compelling aspect. If we can help people understand commercially that this will be beneficial to you, making it greener and helping move more cargo with fewer emissions is a cherry on top. I would say a very important one.!
Probably one of the most important in the long run, but we always focus on a direct business connection before we, you know, help people understand that it is gonna make them green. That’s just, in my opinion, what a lot of people care about, but the more empty miles we reduce, the more idle time we reduce. Naturally the greener it is going to be, like you mentioned, being an ambassador for the barge industry and that’s, you know, a great honor that our team pursues every day.
We want to help the most sophisticated companies in the world leverage barges. We want to be preaching the good word of barge transportation to anybody who will listen to us because it is, in my opinion, one of the core things that has made America an economic powerhouse. If you look at other countries that don’t have inland waterways, they’re far less developed than countries like Europe and America that have long stretching inland waterways and harnessing those is a great key to success for hundreds of years, thousands of years in history, and I want to help continue to push that and make it a key to success in the future.
 

WJ: Really squeezing out the inefficiencies like your products with Open Tug AI are doing is like adding equipment without adding equipment. If you can get more voyages and more miles and more paid hours for your equipment, it’s just like adding barges or a boat without adding them. 

 JW: Correct. You hit on a subject that I think is really important with the price of steel being where it is and the lack of capacity to build barges cheaper and faster. You really do need to focus on making your barges efficient because they’re very expensive to build new barges. Right now, I think it’s not very economical to build a new barge. You’d much rather buy a, you know, older barge. It’s certainly a key driver, helping people maximize the lifetime of their fleet covering more and more demand with the same number of barges. And I think it’s been an area that a lot of our customers have been extremely excited about because it’s something that they try to solve every day. Every day they’re looking through their systems, they’re looking through phones, calls, emails, different platforms, and mentally. Jumping through hoops to figure out, How can I cover this customer’s load with the constraints I have with my schedule, the position of my assets and the conditions in the market? It’s very achievable today to be integrating and capturing all that data and helping to recommend to the user and showing them exactly how much it’ll cost and how much profit they can make by using one barge over another. It’s a place that I personally have been developing. We have a lot of great engineers–I would say some of the best engineers–but I personally code this feature because that’s how important it is to me! 

WJ: I know that AI is part of your operations. Does AI look at the barge data and. Help you come up with new solutions and new tweaks and new insights about the barge industry that you didn’t have a couple of years ago? 

 JA: I would say the biggest “unlock” for us has been our ability to now capture the unstructured data. The barge industry has lived off of emails and PDFs and manual reports for a long time. That is not helpful when it comes to actually getting that data in your system so you can start making decisions, calculating your costs, understanding schedules. We have done a great job of imaking a fully integrated AI pipeline. So you can get to your email, an invoice or a update, and we’re actually able to fully extract that data, match it to the barge and then to the voyage. And whether you’re a carrier or a customer, you might use that data for different things.
So you might take that invoice and then rebill it to your customer. making that a significantly faster, less manual process so people can get paid faster. And if you’re a shipper, you know, you might wanna validate that invoice and make sure you can pay it faster and on time; it gives you, you know, more rapport with your counterparties. So that is just one example
However, we’re now able to do that with contracts, with email orders. We want to create, you know, the web that connects all the systems in the industry because we can take that unstructured data and get it into our customer’s systems. To feed the next stage of their workflow. And a lot of that data before was pretty much unusable. You would have to manually transcribe it into your system to start making decisions. That’s been a major tailwind for our business, and I think one of the things that has been a key to success for us to make commercial and logistics operations easier than ever before, because before maybe you could optimize your barges, but. You would have to manually record your schedule for everything, and that takes a long time. Or you might need to have related to it because you know, ultimately that data is important when deciding which barge. But because nobody ever wanted to sit and enter all that data, you couldn’t use it to optimize it.  

WJ: That sounds great, and it calls to mind the name of this recent Corps of Engineers initiative, “building Infrastructure Not Paperwork. 

 JA: Yeah, a hundred percent. I guess you would be using infrastructure, not filling out paperwork. We’re trying to create the digital infrastructure you know, solves a lot of the industry’s problems. We wanna help all the systems integrate across the market because that way, if we can make it much easier to get an understanding of when something will happen, we can be sure that we remove any obstructing delays that are gonna cause us to be inefficient. Like we don’t tell the terminal when we’re coming, that we can guarantee that we’re probably not gonna be called in right away. However, if we can give them enough lead time, we can be sure that we probably will. 

 WJ: Are the terminals themselves keeping up with the technology and with the digitization of information? 

 JA: So I think that there’s still more work to go, but that is an area that we have actually started to work with several terminals on the inland rivers to give them better visibility of their inbound barge pipeline so that they can make sure that when a barge does arrive, they’re ready and they can help that carrier and the customer get the barge back faster. Yeah, there’s more work to be done. I mean, the terminal industry, especially on the inland waterways, is very nuanced. People have done things differently at every terminal. So there is a lot more work, I would say, to go and understand that. But we have some good partners that we’re working with give us a good representation of how we can help them get more efficient too. Because that is where you see, you know, quite a bit of idle time, at those interchange points. 

 WJ: In one of your other podcasts, Jason, you spent quite a bit of time talking about containerization on the waterways, and ever since I started covering those meetings, I’ve understood (perhaps dimly) that it’s something where everything needs to be built at once. All the pieces have to fall in place at once. You can’t build one piece and then another piece and they will come. You gotta have, you know, the routing and the terminals and the orders of the customers all understanding, as I think you pointed out, doesn’t have to be just in time, but it has to be arrival on time. 

 JA: Yes, definitely. Like it might be okay to take a while as long as you’ve planned for it to take a while. You don’t want it to be unexpected. Now, you know, containerization on barge is definitely a long-term goal. It’s not gonna be an overnight situation. It’s going to come, in my opinion, from a broader audience, focusing on marine transportation and how it can be maximized. And you know, that needs to be done at the commercial level. And unfortunately, the government level, which is not the most efficient, you know. Myself personally, for the next 50 to, you know, 60 years–hopefully I’m still working in that amount of time!–I do plan on dedicating every ounce of my working energy to helping to solve the problems that the barge industry and marine industry has today. 
And also tackling some of the infrastructure problems that you know, cause us to be limited to date. We have an aging lock and dam system, but I also see a world where we can actually expand, you know, the network of waterways. We have certain critical waterways that used to be used for transportation over time. And you know, as we continue to advance in society in progress, I think that opens more opportunity for people to focus. What is the art of the possible in terms of our transportation network? How can we maximize it? We might have great road systems, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t maximize our river transportation. That is where I hope to spend quite a bit of time focusing on.
I’ve seen it firsthand in Southern California. My wife and their family own a very large aggregate farm moving almonds, walnuts, and rice into the California Valley. You have hundreds of millions of tons of dry bulk products on a nearly navigable river moving down to the port of San Francisco. The only reason that we can’t cut emissions in costs in half is because the government doesn’t want to dredge a little bit of water. This is like a couple hundred miles of almost navigable waterways and you know, it could have very immediately reduced, I think it was 60,000 emissions of cars for product that doesn’t need to be there tomorrow. If it takes two to three days, that’s fine and we can cut the cost significantly. So those are just some of the opportunities in America where I see enough lobbying and energy, great gains to be made and I’m actively taking steps to help businesses and, and people identify, you know, where are our long-term goals in, in the marine industry. And I think that’s ultimately opening more waterways. 

 WJ: Including this river in the Pacific Northwest, or the canal, I should say, that would connect the upper reaches of the Missouri with the Snake Columbia system? 

 JA: A hundred percent. That is, you know, one of my personal long-term goals, not necessarily Open Tug, but myself personally, and if you look at what some nations have done, China, they’ve built a 1,200 mile manmade water wave, and they’ve even built ship elevators. But we have some of the longest, best navigable rivers and some of the best engineers in the world. And the only reason that we aren’t thinking about this is because people aren’t innovating to a certain degree on marine transportation. There’s about a hundred to 200 miles stretch to overcome. The Snake River and the Missouri River could nearly meet, which would ultimately create the Northwest Passage, the one that you know, was sought after by every early explorer and president of American history. It’s what the Lewis and Clark Expedition was initially designed to go identify. They didn’t find it, but they did find that it almost exists. Think about progress! When I think about people going to Mars, we just sent people to the moon, but we’re not thinking about how we can create the inter-continental waterway. You know, to me it’s simply a lack of desire and a lack of effort with which I plan to help bring to the table. We could send a freight from coast to coast. 

 WJ: Does this idea [of a canal linking the Snake/Columbia system to the Missouri River] have a history? Is it new or have other people thought of this? 

JA: The idea of the waterway is actually,not new. it’s a very old idea, but I think technology has come a long enough way that it’s actually becoming feasible. China has built a ship elevator to literally ascend Mountains. They’re almost like a lock, like a large lock that can lift a barge. Now that that has already been done, we can look at the plans of what people have done in the past and apply it, with our current technology I think it would.
They built Transcontinental Railroad and had to literally blow up mountains to do it. I think it is a hundred percent feasible to extend a two-hundred-mile canal to connect those two waterways. There’s easier paths to explore it. Specifically, you know, Southern Montana connecting into the Snake River in Idaho, and a couple other specific paths that could be approached. I’m not saying that this is any going to be an overnight thing at all. I’m talking about the next 50, you know, to a hundred years. But I’ve spent a lot of time listening to history and realizing, you know, how short our current lifetime is, but if we can at least set up the parties and the future generations with the knowledge and desire to go do this, we can certainly have it done. 

 WJ: You mentioned waterways that used to be commercial. I just have an item this week in the b because somebody in Congress dedicated money to this, the Mobile Engineer District had a hearing in Tallahassee about possibly reopening the Apalachicola River to commercial navigation, something that environmentalists hugely oppose. I think barge traffic stopped there in 2005, I just thought you’d be interested to know that they were at least thinking about it again. 

 JA: And I mean, I suspect that people will continue to think about it because as people in America specifically, we’re always looking to push the boundaries and we’re innovating at a pace that’s faster than I think any time in history with enough time on this earth like we are bound to continue to mold it and shape it.
And while there is a lot of work to be done on the waterway system, probably some things that prioritize should be prioritized, like our existing lock and dam infrastructure, it is absolutely no reason that we shouldn’t be continuing to push and expand the waterways themselves. 
There’s a reason that you know, so much of our products move by barge and if we can help other regions access that same great mode of transportation. Then think we’re bound to continue to make progress for our nation. that, you know, there are other innovations that are helping solve problems with extending our waterways. One of them, a startup called a Rainmaker, they actually are, you know, using drones to seed the clouds. Make it rain in specific areas. So as other parts of industry develop, creates other opportunities to bring and apply that specifically to marine transportation. I’m thinking in areas of low water, if we can literally make it rain, you know, on demand, which I think may be possible in the near future. We can solve those problems and it can actually enable us to, you know, push waterways in areas that maybe there wasn’t enough rain before. So I’m really excited about what is being developed in technology as a whole. Nut we need to be thinking about, How do you apply that commercially to the maritime industry? We’re doing it in a small way, applying AI to help streamline commercial and logistics workflows, but I think that has laid the groundwork. For open t desiring to be a leader in building and taking, helping push technology that is working in other industries and bring it into the maritime industry, specifically the barge industry. 

 WJ: t’s interesting you bring that up because we’re in an exciting period where we have this big push to revitalize the American merchant, marine, and military ship building, naval ship building, and shipbuilding in general in the whole maritime sector. Now it’s still being developed. We have the Ships for America Act is still under development in Congress.
We’ve got the Maritime Action Plan that just came out. The president’s new budget wants to boost money for military shipbuilding. Is there anywhere in all these efforts, and I don’t wanna spill any beans that you may not be ready to talk about, but does this have opportunities for, Open Tug  to play a part? 

 JA: I would say that we are less Involved on the actual construction of assets. I think it’s definitely something that I have on my horizon. I plan on building in the maritime space for the next 40, 50 years, if not longer, and I have ideas that I would hope to see applied and if somebody doesn’t apply them by the time that I’m ready to do it, then I probably would explore it myself. But I’m very supportive of what’s being done. I think the more assets that are being built, the lower the cost is to build barges. You’re gonna see people get creative and find ways to leverage them.
I always like to look at other business leaders that I’ve been inspired by, and one of those people is Ray Kroc, who is the founder of McDonald’s. Whenever he would open a new McDonald’s, he would build an extra cash register. Even though it was not necessary at the time of him making the new McDonald’s, he knew that if he added more capacity, the teams would get creative and identify new ways to fill that capacity with demand.
So I believe that the barge industry should also build the extra cash register and building barges, may have a short term effects on lowering rates, but I think the more barges that there are and the more that people are focusing on barges, the more we’re gonna identify new ways and more ways to leverage the barge industry. which is a very exciting time and one that I’m definitely committed to helping drive that creativity. In the industry and we’ll continue to be building technology that will help the people who receive those barges to put them to work and to optimize them and to earn as much money as they can with them. 

IWJ: Is there anything else about Open Tug’s recent product offerings or operations or tweaks that you want our viewers to know about? 

 JA: I think open tug is developing at maybe the fastest has ever gone before, and I think faster than a lot of technology out there in the space. We’re really building with the carriers. We’ve spent a lot of time building with the charters and the shippers of barge transportation, and we’ve now released end-to-end workflows that enable the carriers to maximize their commercial operations. I think we’re helping bring more connectivity between shippers and carriers, and we’re devoting a lot of resources and energy to helping the operating system of the future for everybody who touches inland waterways, terminals, carriers, shippers. and I would hope that everybody stays in touch and follows our progress. We always are ready to roll up our sleeves, dig in, and solve some of the biggest hairiest problems in the space. We’re doing that today and we look forward to doing that for, to come. 

 WJ: Well, Jason, thank you for speaking with us. Am I gonna see you at the Inland Marine Expo? At the end of May in Nashville? 

 JA: We’re actually starting to invest even more in the Waterways journal. This show [IMX} has been tremendous. I think it may be a great show, one of the best for the barge industry. We’re really excited to be a part of it. We’re getting a bigger booth, 1436, I’ll be there personally to show off the great innovations and great work that Open tug has been building. So I hope to see everybody there and I’d recommend that people go to that show because it’s one of the best to connect and learn about the space. 

 WJ: Well, Jason, thank you so much