Safety plays a major role in the maritime industry, especially during these challenging times of a global pandemic. Incidents of all sorts, big or small, happen the latest one: the grounding of Ever Given in the Suez Canal, outlining thus the necessity of an effective Safety Management System which is key to ensure the well-being and safety of crew and vessel. There are many approaches to safety, but throughout the years a few definitions have been defined touching upon a set of best practice recommendations that both the crew on board and the personnel ashore share alike.
With EcoOnline Crisis Management, ship managers can drastically reduce uncontrolled behaviour, reduce risk of greater incidents and all in a cost-effective way–leading to greater quality, reliability, efficiency and performance from which the shipowner and customers will profit. There’s a great set of standard incidents/procedures that need to be accounted for. Below illustrates how EcoOnline Crisis Management lets you tackle some of them as outlined in the ISM Code.
1. A safety and environmental protection policy.
EcoOnline Crisis Management software lets you administer and outline a comprehensive safety and environmental protection policy by defining the potential risk associated with normal ships operation and determining the necessary procedures that need to be followed if such an incident occurs e.g., bunker spill, MOB, piracy, engine stop, first aid procedures, etc.
2. Instructions and procedures to ensure the safe operation of ships and protection of the environment in compliance with relevant international and flag state legislation.
Procedures outlined by regulatory authorities are easy to follow up within the software tool. To ensure safe operations, every shipowner needs to perform a risk analysis on the potential threats occurring at sea to both crew and vessel. With EcoOnline Crisis Management, you create the relevant threat scenarios and assign tasks applicable to each scenario.
3. Defined levels of authority and lines of communication between and amongst shore and shipboard personnel.
When an incident happens, EcoOnline Crisis Management will easily assist you in keeping all relevant stakeholders updated and informed about the progress and situation of said incident. Automated alerts are triggered when a defined scenario is activated either by the App or Web-solution. With live communication features, all necessary personnel will always be able to assess the current status and enable to allocate resources where they are most needed.
Furthermore, you can keep your insurance company (P&I & H&M) or other important stakeholders in the loop.
4. Procedures for reporting accidents and non-conformance with the provisions of the Code.
EcoOnline logs all the activities relating to a specific incident. This feature will help the shipowner and/or local authorities to audit these and allow for a comprehensive analysis of the incident handling. This insight will enable us to assess whether tasks or resources could have been handled more efficiently.
5. Procedures to prepare for and respond to emergency situations.
The software lets you react at a moment’s notice to emergency situations. The scenarios within EcoOnline Crisis Management will automatically assign the relevant tasks to the relevant personnel and mobilize the resources necessary to mitigate the outfall of any incident.
6. Procedures for internal audits and management reviews.
Both the Certificate of Compliance and Safety Management Certificate are documents attesting that the ship management board has procedures and guidelines in place to conduct safe vessel operations. EcoOnline will ensure your continuous compliance with the ISM Code by reminding you when either of the above-mentioned certificates will reach their anniversary date and need to be renewed. Our auditing feature within the crisis management module will allow you to easily re-evaluate your current SMS and make adaptions where necessary. The shipowner will have a comprehensive and easily accessible overview of their organizations’ SMS.