Maritime operations are complex and consists of multiple phases which requires coordination among all the departments and their responsible executives. Almost every phase in maritime operations requires compliances with various maritime authorities, ports, HSE, environmental authorities etc. increasing administrative activities for ship operators and owners. Each and every trade and transaction involved in these operations accompanies paperwork and these docs needs to be stored, maintained and made available to executives and operations, legal departments in case of any queries.
As per the recent survey, it has been observed that more than 75% of the organizations face business risks and compliance related issues as a result of traditional paper based processes and sluggish workflows. Especially in maritime industry, this poses more critical threat to overall operational efficiency considering the higher documents and compliance dependency.
The problem becomes bigger when these docs go through the business processes which requires review, approve or rework on these documents.
Non-availability of digital documentation management system increases the possibility of losing critical documents of these compliances in the paper based workflows resulting into low productivity of the overall operations.
Some of the major problems created by not having an efficient document management system are:
The primary advantage of having document management system in maritime operations is to properly store different versions of the documents or images of paper documents to facilitate the compliances/processes and streamline the operations.
Benefits offered by the efficient document management system over the conventional systems are numerous, some of them are enlisted below:
- Helps the executives to manage, control and update the different versions of the documents to fulfil the compliances by providing relevant documents at the right stages of the operations
- Maintains complete traceability of documents from its very first to final versions
- Facilitates its distribution to various stakeholders
- Documents stored centrally to be accessible from anywhere and from any device
- Easy access and management with interactive user interface
- Easy distribution manuals, circulars, bulletins and vessel drawings
- Assurance of common operating standards for both on-board and ashore operations centres facilitating knowledge sharing across the organization
- Last but not least, document security
With an appropriate document management system, ship owners and operators can avoid difficulties and administrative burden arising from the manual document management workflows. Suitable DMS can solve the problem of how crew members and ashore operation executives can handle the documents and the processes associated with it. By integrating efficient DMS and letting the system automate these process, ship owners and operators can cut costs and boost productivity with direct impact on organization’s bottom line.