Vessel Compliance Automation
This project was initiated to ensure that all vessel certificates have been uploaded and processed into the fleet management software. So the fleet available data was kept up to date.
Challenge
All vessels that are maintained by the company require compliance certificates to operate and be up-to-date and available at any moment upon request by a port authority or by a maritime enforcement agency. Any violations of a certificate found out of compliance will require the vessel to remain at port or anchor until the required inspection/certificate is completed and brought back into compliance. These certificates are managed by two individuals (4 Hours a day) within the organization who manage an international fleet with certificates in multiple languages. The data from each certificate is required to be manually input into a vessel management solution that is accessible by the vessels and port authorities. Any data entry discrepancy can allow a certificate to be out of compliance and place a vessel in peril of unexpected costs. Last year alone these data discrepancies cost the organization over $1 million in lost revenue alone.
Technology Utilized
Power Automate Desktop (RPA Unattended)
Each vessel department fills out a spreadsheet with overtime data. These spreadsheets are highly formatted.
Power Flow
Power Automate was utilized to ingest and process all certificates.
M365
SharePoint lists and libraries are used to store and house content for this process.
Power Application
A custom application was developed to aid the staff in data validation to ensure no data errors exist.
Azure SQL
Add data was saved to an Azure SQL Database.
ABS Nautical Systems (NS) NS5 Fleet Management Software
A enterprise maritime client application that is utilized to manage all vessels in the fleet.
Strategy
Since each certificate is completed on the vessel each captain/department head was required to scan as a PDF and email the completed certificate to a shared inbox. Changing this would be detrimental to the fleet as the training could cause an issue. The approach that was designed is to listen to the shared mailbox via a power automate flow and upload the PDF attachments to a document library named incoming. Upon the arrival of a document in the incoming document library it was scanned via a custom model developed in AI Builder that OCR’ed the document and digitized the text and submitted the data to a list. Each Certificate was then required to be uploaded to a client application that was only accessible via a Citrix client. We utilized an Unattended RPA Desktop flow that utilized an Azure VM to start a Citrix client, login and utilize the vessel management client application. Once the vessel management system was brought up the correct vessel was identified in the system, the certificate was then identified, and the correlating data was entered. and the document was uploaded. This process also notified a vessel management individual of any data discrepancies or data entry errors during process automation.
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Result
In the 6 months that this automation has been running, we have had 0 data entry errors and not one vessel has been required to remain at port or anchor due to certificate discrepancies. As well as the 2 person staff they have been allowed to perform activities that optimize fleet operations and only spend 1 hour a week at maximum doing certificate management for all of the fleet.