The Key To Insightful Safety Inspections Part 4: Holistic Data Management
Proactive maritime safety management is only possible when data is managed in a unified approach.
Proactive maritime safety management is only possible when data is managed in a unified approach.
To proactively mitigate risks and reduce deficiencies, all shipping companies rely on their frontline workers, namely crews, to regularly conduct inspections and maintenance work. However, most of the time, data gathered through routine inspections is not useable for sophisticated data analysis. Proactive management becomes impossible.
Before we dive into how shipping companies can harness inspection data better, let’s take a look at the best practice process for extracting actionable insights from data:
1. Define why you need data analysis.
2. Begin collecting data from sources.
3. Clean through unnecessary data.
4. Begin analyzing the data.
5. Interpret the results and apply them.
As shown above, making the right data driven decisions requires extensive data compiling and cleaning, even if homogenous sources are used.
In the case of vessel health data, shipping companies are confronted with even bigger challenges. Inspections and maintenance documentation usually relies on non-standardized data, in the form of excel or word templates, filled out with free text and pictures from digital cameras. More often than not, also paper forms are still a part of the mix. In cases where it is even possible to further use these data points, data cleaning and reformatting requires deep expertise and consumes a large amount of time. Professionals ashore usually lack both, as it is not a core part of their job.
This leads to shipping companies missing out on important learnings about how vessel maintenance can be improved and how to detect risks before they turn into issues.
The firs step to create a unified dataset is to standardize the data collection process itself. Especially for manual data collection, providing a clear structure and giving detailed guidance is of the utmost importance. If this prerequisite is fulfilled, previously useless information suddenly provides valuable insights.
By making sure pictures are taken from the same perspective every time, condition trends and developments can be analyzed automatically. Reporting deficiencies using always the same labels, picked from a set of pre-defined options allows clear, fleet-wide analysis of the biggest problems. Minimizing free-text fields let's you apply automation to more and more processes.
Though crews get trained regularly, it’s difficult to stay up to date with all existing and changing procedures. Especially with the evolutions of laws and regulations, crews face even higher pressure when conducting inspections. Clear guidance therefore not only gives you a better data set, it also makes the job of your crew easier.
Kaiko Systems guides crews through smart checklists, allowing them to take pictures from pre-defined perspectives, rate deficiencies across standardised scales and add comment tags directly where the action happens. To upload inspection results like pictures and comments, crews don’t need to go through desktop computers and excel templates anymore. All they have to do is to press the upload button on the mobile App. This has removed gruesome administrative work in the inspection process and crews have reported saving of 50% of the time spent on these tasks.
Having a unified vessel health database gives the possibility to perform any kind of analysis to generate valuable insights about the fleet. It also gives organizations opportunities to gain competitive advantages. Below is how Kaiko Systems helps shipping companies to maximizes the usage of vessel health data:
Quick Overview for improved workflows
The main objective for the quick overview is to understand the overall vessel health: It shows users the health score, the number of deficiencies found and the most urgent action items. Modules are clearly separated and components are organized in a tree structure, so that the responsible manager can quickly find the job they are looking for.
Leveraging the verified and unified inspection data base, Kaiko Systems organizes the overview automatically. This enables quick communication and improved workflows between shore teams and crews on vessel health management.
Real time analytics for better decision support
Usually, users are not able to see deteriorating components, overdue inspections or new deficiencies in time to prevent a bad outcome. This way, time is lost when teams try to find the right piece of information, plan, and make decisions. Kaiko Systems makes real-time analytics possible and presents the most important data front and center.
The dashboard shows deteriorating components, overdue inspections and new deficiencies. Teams are also able to conduct retrospective analysis to see which damages, root causes, preventive or corrective actions were most frequently reported across the fleet and take these insights into account for the future.
Sharing vessel health data for effective reporting
Sharing & forwarding information is crucial to the operations within the shipping industry, but it has been challenging for ship operators to collaborate based on a shared data set. Often, the same data is collected repeatedly by multiple parties, which can lead to conflicts.
To collaborate more effectively, partially sharing a set of reliable & verified data is necessary. By easily selecting components relevant to each party, and creating reports with the click of a button, a lot of time is saved, and many discussions are prevented.
Aligning incentives for dynamic collaboration in the maritime ecosystem
The possibilities go far beyond technical management: Collaboration between shore teams, crews and other ecosystem players is made possible by allowing users to share access to verified vessel health data. This creates opportunities for joint learnings, improved communication, and better collaboration. Kaiko Systems enables stakeholders in the maritime industry to gain a competitive advantage by aligning incentives with their partners, based on reliable data.
Want to learn more about how to turn routine inspections into structured data? Reach out to our data experts. We are happy to get in touch.