Ian Garton
Now established as a provider of independent services. Speciality fields include analytical modelling in Excel VBA to develop user-focussed tools for smaller companies. Large volumes of data are gathered, cleansed, analysed and the salient aspects reported.
I continue to be the leading developer of maritime Pool revenue distribution models.
Buying a Bike!
Maritime Economist and Analyst
Formerly Head of Research at a firm of maritime consultants. I worked on all aspects of the company’s business gathering over thirteen years’ experience in this field.
My primary responsibility was in maintaining market information on the oil and gas transportation sectors. This involve analysing trends in the energy and shipping markets and preparing the company’s monthly and quarterly tanker market outlooks. These reports included crude and products supply and demand, petroleum trade flows, tanker supply and demand, spot and time charter rates. Additionally, I took the lead role in developing the models used in strategic projects on single and multi-client basis, including producing models as deliverables.
Excel/VBA Model Development
I revised most of the workbooks within this spreadsheet-based company to make them more streamlined, protect the integrity of the many workbook links and make them more intelligible to newer users. Further key improvements included developing VBA based tools to speed workflows. Similarly, I also created web-scraping tools to help with the large amount of data that was extracted from the internet. One very important task was a chemical plant database, that allowed users with low computer skills to easily extract data using any possible combination of criteria.
The company was heavily involved in expert witness cases and I was responsible for producing the background evaluations and analysis required. Of particular attraction to lawyers was a route combination system. This took a list of fixtures and produced the estimated economics of all possible voyage combinations using any given speed and consumption data.
Maritime Pool Revenue Distribution Systems
Presentations and Training
I was a regular speaker on management training programmes and workshops, primarily in the London and Oxford, but also in other parts of the world. This included providing delegates with an in-depth introduction to the tanker market. Additionally, I ran a series of exercises and business games throughout the courses. The exercises were tailored to suit the region where the course took place, including Sydney, Singapore and Rio de Janeiro.
Previous Experience
I previously spent thirteen years in utility cost control looking at the energy costs to the Public sector, SMEs and Large Industrials. Starting as an Analyst, moving on to be Senior Analyst and finally Manager of the Analysis group. This team monitored changes in the electricity and gas markets during the deregulation of these industries.
The markets changed rapidly at this time, and my team needed to understand and handle all changes, their impact on pricing structures and costs to clients.
I developed new analysis methods and systems to help achieve the lowest prices for clients in the deregulated markets. These systems providing faster handling of incoming offers, compared the offers for all clients and enabled targeting companies whose rates had most room for improvement.
The development of these systems involved working with the company’s IT department to develop new PC based tools for use by all the analysts to extract data from the company’s mainframe and use the analysis tools that could not be created by the IT section itself.