Digital technology provides far greater opportunities to report data on incidents and meet stakeholder expectations. As the demand for safer operations in maritime grows, digital opportunities can help prevent accidents, keep crews safe, minimise damage, and prevent delays.
As a result, vessel owners who can make the most of these opportunities will be poised to gain a reputational edge over competitors.
Safer ways of working enable the transition of more work from sea to land, reducing the likelihood of equipment, voyage and cyber incidents. With a more proactive approach to safety, digitalisation empowers you to identify potential risks sooner and mitigate them before harm or damage is caused. This makes it possible to increase the efficiency and alignment of your safety programs. Take inspiration from five tips to make the most of digitalisation and work safer.
Learn from the past to create a safer future
Using the cloud to consolidate all your data will boost your performance analytics, which is how you collect, analyse and interpret all kinds of data. This makes it possible to continuously measure, analyse and improve performance over time, more quickly and easily identifying potential safety risks. It’s safer to learn from past and present data to prevent future incidents.
For example, analysing data on past accidents and near-misses across your fleet leads to insights that help prevent future incidents. These insights can also help you keep safety measures up to date and provide better reports to the authorities, reducing the number of accidents and improving overall safety.
Enable real-time safety awareness
Bring together activities from multiple systems in one place and you can alert users about potential maintenance issues and even conflicts such as work being performed nearby, in sensitive areas, or at heights. With predictive maintenance alerts and proactive monitoring, you can ensure proper maintenance and operation of your fleet. It’s safer to be aware of safety hazards in real time.
For example, ensuring your ship-based crews and land-based staff are aware of potential safety risks enables them to work proactively to prevent accidents, injuries, and other safety incidents – preventing harm to the crew, damage to the ship or adverse impacts on other vessels or port workers. Real-time monitoring systems can also detect incidents as they occur, making it easier to safely plan voyages from onshore. This speeds up incident response, helping to meet regulatory requirements, minimise damage, prevent escalation and increase safety awareness.
Open up secure data flows
With the right cloud-based digital tools, land-based staff can securely access data and applications from across your fleet in one place. This requires overcoming traditional data silos from each ship’s local network and outdated, slow and inefficient ways of transmitting data from ships. AI-driven enhancements in cloud security with access controls and pattern recognition in fact provide even greater security than the old ways. It’s safer to use the latest in cloud security for accessing all fleet data centrally.
For example, vessel owners can have land-based staff centrally monitor, plan and manage multiple vessels with a birds-eye view of all relevant safety parameters and data points. This reduces the risk of something going unnoticed or human error. A team of remote workers can be on standby, ready to respond rapidly if a vessel experiences an emergency anywhere in the world. This way, onboard crews can receive effective decision support to ensure their safety.
Open up potential for safer training with simulations
Safety training has always been an important part of maritime industry safety programs. Now, the effectiveness of this training can be significantly improved with digitalisation. Using digital twins to produce simulations, you can create a safe and controlled environment for your staff to practice and improve their skills. It’s safer to make training like real life – but without any real-life risks.
For instance, you could simulate training for infrequent or high-risk scenarios, such as a vessel collision or a severe engine malfunction. You can also use digital tools to provide simple and instant access to safety procedures and asset information. This way, your crew can more confidently and competently approach accidents and errors. This improves both crisis management and overall safety.
Create a shared view of operating conditions
All of your personnel will be able to see the same data at the same time and interpret it better with a central data repository in the cloud and data contextualisation. This improves situational awareness, giving your staff a shared view of what’s happening around them, a common understanding of these events, and the ability to quickly align on safety measures. It’s safer to have everyone on the same page.
For example, various onboard crew members can be instantly and collectively made aware of any maintenance work, adverse weather or other circumstances nearby that could affect their safety. This also enables remote staff to seamlessly provide support with an immediate understanding of what’s happening onboard the vessel. Overall, this shared view of operating conditions reduces risks of human error, misunderstanding and delayed response.
All of these safer ways of working are driven by data consolidation and contextualisation in the cloud, making the data available securely from anywhere. To get the most of these five tips, you will need to choose the right cloud infrastructure.
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