Questions shipowners ask

Not yet. MARPOL lets an electronic record book replace the paper one only where it is approved by the Administration, taking into account IMO’s guidelines (MEPC.312(74)), and the ship then carries a Declaration of MARPOL electronic record book for that software. For a Norwegian ship, Sjøfartsdirektoratet requires the approval to come from one of the recognised organisations — your class society — which can assess the software first and then the installation on board.

NoRemarks has not been through that assessment yet, so today the electronic Oil Record Book and Garbage Record Book are working aids: the paper books remain the official record and are kept as well, and every screen and printed copy says so. What we provide is a record built to the requirements it will be judged against — entries that cannot be altered after signature, corrections made as new entries, a true copy that prints in the statutory layout — and the documentation of how it works, for that assessment.

The work carries on. Jobs are closed, rest hours are recorded and reviewed, the oil record book is written, checklists are completed and defects are reported with photographs — each on the device it is done on, where it queues in a durable outbox.

What a week without a link does change is that the devices on board do not see each other’s work until it returns, because they reach each other through the server ashore. A permit is therefore raised, gas-tested and signed on one device that goes round the people who sign it, as a clipboard would: each signs as themselves, with their own PIN or a drawn signature, and the permit records whose device it was. Its check against other work covers the permits that device knows about, and says so.

When the link comes back each device sends what it did and pulls what it missed. Nothing is lost and nothing disappears silently: the rules ran on the device when the work was done, and the rare entry that another device’s work has overtaken — two people closing the same job — is shown to the person who made it.

Yes, from the office, as Excel (.xlsx) or CSV — exported from AMOS, ShipManager, Star IPS or a spreadsheet, or typed into our template, which comes in English and Norwegian. The columns are matched from their headings and remembered for the next ship, and a check — a dry run on the server — shows row by row what will be created, changed or refused, and why, before anything is written. What is brought in is exactly what the check showed, or nothing; every row is in the change log under the name of whoever brought it in, and the same file brought in twice changes nothing.

What comes in: the components with their tree, criticality and its basis, class references, maker, type and serial number; the jobs with their calendar or running-hour intervals, tolerance, responsible rank and when each was last done, so the first due dates are right from the first day; the counters with their readings; the history, kept on each component as the old system wrote it and planning nothing; the spare-part catalogue with the components each part fits, and each ship’s shelves, whose figures come in as a first count; the crew list, with next of kin and an account to invite where you want one; the crew’s certificates; and each ship’s own certificates with their last survey. A sister vessel’s register can be copied instead: the tree, the jobs and the counters, never what she has done.

What does not come in: the old system’s documents and scans, its signed work as signed work, open work orders and requisitions, rest hours and passwords. A file is at most 8 MB and 10,000 rows. What takes the time is not the import; it is deciding which of the eleven thousand jobs in the old system are real.

Both, and it is the same code. It installs from the browser to a home screen and runs full-screen with no address bar, offline included. It is not in the App Store or Google Play, so if your device management installs only from the stores, tell us before you plan the rollout.

A role is granted at a scope — the company, a fleet, or a single vessel — and the product asks whether this person may do this thing here, rather than what their title is. An explicit denial outranks any grant. A master can let somebody on board sign the rest-hour records on the master’s behalf, for a set period, and that authority ends on its own date.

One thing nobody can see, at any level: another person’s messages.

Purchasing produces orders, receipts and landed totals, and everything is exportable in a machine-readable form. A direct integration is a conversation about your specific system; we would rather build one properly than list a hundred logos.

A live feed, bound to your vessel by MMSI, with the MMSI validated and refused if another vessel already claims it. Every screen that shows a position also shows how old it is — live, delayed, stale, or no recent position — because a position shown without its age invites somebody to act on a four-hour-old fix as though it were now.

Email, answered by the people who wrote the code. There is no first line reading from a script, so a chief engineer describing a maintenance interval problem does not have to get past somebody who does not know what a running hour is.

We are open weekdays 08:00–16:00 Norwegian time, not on Norwegian public holidays. Something that stops a ship is answered within 2 hours during opening hours. There is no round-the-clock watch: sent outside those hours, it is answered within 2 hours of our opening. Within the same opening hours, a fault is answered within 8 hours and a question within 16 hours. The app keeps working on board in the meantime, with or without a link to shore.