Accommodation

MLC 2006 Regulation 3.1 — accommodation and recreational facilitiesSeafarers shall have decent accommodation, and the competent authority shall require frequent inspections on board to ensure accommodation is clean, decently habitable and maintained in good repair. The inspection record is the part that has to exist on paper.

Cabin allocation is a five-minute job that becomes an hour when the information is in somebody’s head and that somebody has gone home. On a vessel running two rotations with hot bunking it is not a five-minute job at all.

The register here is decks, cabins and berths, and occupancy follows the crew list rather than being maintained beside it. The part that repays the effort is the cleaning board: it knows who is on the opposite watch, so a cabin is not cleaned at the hour its occupant is asleep in it.

• Decks, cabins and berths as a register. The real layout of this vessel, once, and every screen reads it.
• Occupancy follows the crew list. Sign a person on and their berth is allocated; sign them off and it frees. Nobody maintains a second list.
• The cabin board. Free, occupied, needs cleaning — one screen the steward works from.
• Tied to the watch. The board knows who is on which watch, so it does not propose cleaning a cabin whose occupant is in it.
• The cleaning record. When it was done and by whom, which is the record MLC inspections ask for and the one nobody keeps.
• A layout view. The arrangement as a plan rather than as a table, because a cabin number means nothing to somebody who joined yesterday.

• The cabin board — free, occupied, needs cleaning
• Layout — the arrangement as a plan

Accommodation is two screens and it will stay two screens. A shipowner does not need a cabin management product; it needs to stop losing ten minutes a day and it needs the cleaning record to exist when MLC asks for it.

Resisting the urge to grow a small module is most of what keeps a system usable at the fifth year.