nir-vana innovation network

A Greek ΙΤ company has developed a fully integrated platform that connects all divisions in a maritime shipping company, ashore & on-board.

As regards company’s activities they offer integrated business information and business intelligence solutions in conjunction with the usage of Enterprise Resource Planning systems (ERPs). They are also official partner for SAP business one products. The company is active in both Greece and abroad (projects in U.S., Balkans, Cyprus) with major customers in the areas of financial, manufacturing and trading services.

With respect to the offered technology, it constitutes basically a single software solution exclusively for maritime industry with extensive functionalities that can make all the processes smoother and streamlined. There are existing software solutions in the market but they constitute just partial solutions. The biggest strength of the platform is that supports a number of different modules and it is based on the widely used and market proven software SAP business one.

Analytically, it is designed to facilitate and manage all aspects of the daily activities of a shipping company through the integration of different modules and functionalities.

For the operation department there is a dedicated module for the operations and vessel monitoring on-board and ashore. It stores all vessels of the fleet and focuses on vessel tracking, vessel performance, voyage management, port of call monitoring and others.

For the crew management a specialised module is offered. It allows for registering, keeping and tracking of every single information concerning each crew member including contracts, sea services, evaluations, illness/accident, crew outgoing payments, crew air tickets, drills/trainings and crew documents.

Moreover, there is a module specialised for the financial department of a shipping company to automatically check master’s general accounts (MGA), optimizing the processes monthly and extra allotments, validates pay-slips received from the master, calculation of wages and records of crew ledgers, payments and expenses on-board etc. It is also optimized for the specific needs of accounting division including support for multi-company and multi-currency transactions.

In addition, the offered platform deploys a computerized maintenance management (CMMS) module providing comprehensive functionalities such as streamlined maintenance control, inventory and purchasing integration, seafarers management as well as efficient and robust reporting.

Concerning chartering department, the technology offers a dedicated solution consisting of charter party with charterer and charter party with ship owner offering the benefit of having an end to end robust functionality covering all aspects of chartering management.

There is also a procurement management module which allows the shipping company and the vessels to streamline entire purchasing process. It supports purchasing planning, vendor, voyage and port selection, purchase requisition, purchase order and supplier relationships management, in order to work rapidly and surely based on a holistic view.

The offered platform allows also for vessel synchronization needed to manage efficiently a fleet of vessels and linking seamlessly both office and vessel into a unified environment with fully automatic data transfer and database synchronization.

The technology is already implemented by several shipping companies in Greece. It is offered either as software as a service (SaaS) solution (accessed via the internet) or on-premise software (installed and maintained on a server on client’s premises).

Currently, the Greek company is willing to introduce the described technology to new promising market areas. Additional partners from maritime shipping industry willing to adopt or further develop that platform are therefore sought. The desired type of partnership is commercial agreement with technical assistance.

Advantages & innovations

The proposed technology is a complete solution that incorporates a diverse range of modules and offers many capabilities that optimize and facilitate the whole processes of a maritime shipping organization. It makes the day to day operations easier and faster generating great benefits such as: It achieves the highest transparency, accuracy, security levels and compliance with international rules and regulations. Also, it yields to higher manpower efficiency and utilization as it can register, keep and track every single information concerning each crew member in a centralized database. In addition, it is fully integrated and due to its unified environment with fully automatic data transfer and database synchronization it performs zero duplications. It drastically reduces miscommunication errors among different divisions and between office stuff and vessel crew members. Moreover, it enables maritime companies to make more confident and proactive decisions, streamline daily operations, and increase the profitability by providing fast access to real-time information. Lastly, the proposed technology is available for interested companies in demo trial. All the above benefits and characteristics make the proposed technology a deployed comprehensive solution, consolidating into a powerful integrated system all aspects of the daily operations of a maritime shipping company.

Stage of development

Already on the market

Partner sought

The Greek company is willing to establish commercial agreement with technical assistance with partners from maritime industry. More specifically, entities active in maritime shipping are sought interested to implement the offered software technology or to cover special needs on shipping management. Additionally, they are looking for SAP partners, business and financial consultants & auditors for maritime companies as well as software houses and technology brokers interested to promote the proposed software solution to the end-users (shipping companies). The collaboration will be based on commercial agreement with technical assistance.