Knowledge management
Our conference on May 7 covered using computers and communications in seafarer distance training, improving personnel management, improving safety and managing procurement
CONTENTS
Simon Courage, Manpower Software
Jenny Pantelis, Ulysses Systems
Click here to see photos from the day
Click here to see some of the original presentations
BODY
“Shipowners are right to ask if it can’t be possible to produce alternatives to expensive shore based training,” said Chris Haughton, deputy managing director of VideoTel.
Computer software and training companies around the world are developing large amounts of training and knowledge management tools, taking advantage in the increasing computer processing power, and reducing costs and increased speed of data communications. And the systems are already being used in shipping companies around the world.
Training seafarers onboard vessels is not a new idea; seafarers have always trained onboard vessels, with an element of training on shore, and this will not change. What is new is the way they can be trained onboard, bringing in remote instructors and computer tools.
“The maritime industry has pretty serious training needs at the moment,” said Mr Haughton. “But if you break it down and work at it incrementally, you won’t have quite so many sleepless nights,” he said.
There is very little regulatory approval granted for courses taken over the internet, for example by seafarers on leave, however. So far, regulatory approval can be granted for courses taken in classrooms but not over the internet.
Empowering seafarers
It is important to empowering seafarers to take control and involvement in their own training, both to learn new skills to be used onboard vessels and to prepare for a career on shore.
“Its one of the most powerful things to give seafarers the power to manage their own training,” said David Patraiko, project director with the Nautical Institute. “We want to involve the crew and ask them how much training they want.”
The type of courses seafarers want to take is often unexpected, said Kognita’s John Douglas, “Seafarers wanted to take courses on food hygiene, stress management and working in multi cultural environments,” he said.
Developing training courses
Many shipping companies are continually inventing their own training courses, said John Douglas of Kognita. They could achieve cost savings by sharing the content between them.
The most important factor when developing a training course is context, making sure the course can help a seafarer for the task in hand. Content is of secondary importance.
Training materials are providing to work best hosted over the internet, so-called “asp” (application service provider) solutions, where the user pays the developer in terms of how much the software is used. This model works much better than “enterprise” solutions, where the buyer purchases the software outright.
The results of the e-learning systems should integrate directly onto shiping company’s personnel system.
Different forms of learning
It is important to consider that there are many different forms of learning; although some people still believe that the only way to learn is in a classroom. “Some of the best learning goes on when two people sit down and have a coffee,” said Kognita’s John Douglas.
Chris Haugton, deputy managing director with UK computer based training software company VideoTel, said that it can be very hard to change people’s ideas about how training should be done.
“Most people consider that whatever training they had as a student was the best, and nothing can be any better,” he said. “But theory moves on.
We are now moving into a third generation of learning, which gets away from traditional classrooms and blackboard – type training to use a wide range of on the job training, computer tools, and being trained by mentors and senior company staff as well as dedicated training staff. “Seafarers can now take advantage of a virtual learning environment,” he said.
“A lot of people equate classrooms with the only way you can possibly learn,” he said. “There are still those who equate a classroom with efficiency of learning. There are implemenation and operation problems with this education theory. Most people do not get to grips with a topic in the classroom.”
Support at sea
Seafarers need more support while they are at sea, including from experienced mentors, said Kognita’s John Douglas. They can also have learning plans for career developments.
The biggest barrier to effective e-learning services onboard ships is still the high cost of ship-shore communications, which still makes internet surfing onboard impossible and dedicated shipboard applications extremely expensive.
The high cost of ship-shore communications and lack of ship-shore broadband service still make distance training very difficult. “People have access to the internet everywhere on land,” said Kognita’s John Douglas. “As soon as they get on the ship, they’re deprived.”
Motivating seafarers
One of the biggest challenges shipping companies face, said Kevin Hewlett of Teekay Shipping, was not recruiting seafarers but encouraging them to stay once they have been recruited.
Retension of seafarers is highest when seafarers come from countries where it is perceived to be an advantage to be at sea, either in terms of pay or status, he said.
VideoTel’s Chris Haughton commented that the low quality of life onboard vessels is the biggest reason why seafaring proves so unpopular as a career choice. “There’s no fun factor,” he said. “Nobody builds fun into a business model for persuading seafarers to stay.”
AIS training
Ted Hackett, a lecturer at Fleetwood Nautical College, UK, talked about the major headache shipping companies have ahead of them training seafarers to use the incoming Automatic Identification Systems (AIS) for vessels.
However the issue of AIS training has barely even been addressed yet by the industry, he said. “Does anybody know what AIS training needs are?” he asked. “There are no training regulations and nobody knows how AIS is going to be used.”
He estimated that seafarers will need to go on a 2 week residential course to learn how to use AIS, but shipowners can handle the training much more cost effectively by implementing computer and communications based training packages onboard vessels. “Distance learning can be delivered anywhere, flexibily and cost effectively,” he said.
George Hoyt, Newslink
George Hoyt, CEO of Newslink Services, of Hawaii, talked about how Newslink is integrating training materials in the CD-ROMs of news, movie reviews and other fun things which are mailed to ships every month. “We follow the adage, if its fun, it gets done,” he said. “Learning shouldn’t be as serious as we make it.”
“The most effective was for seafarers to learn is to involve them in the learning process,” he said. “Often a seafarer is not even aware that he’s been trained.”
“Newslink has evolved into a blended learning system,” he said. “Most of our customers put NewsLink in their safety and training budget.”
Seagull Software
Roger Ringstad, marketing director of maritime training software company Seagull, said that computer based training in the maritime industry is a relatively new thing.
“More than two thirds of crew onboard vessels have very little experience using computers at all,” he said.
Most shipboard computer based training systems being provided today do have facilities for sending reports to and from the vessels, he said.
Seagull did a survey with its customer Bergesen into the major factors for the success of computer based training onboard, and found that one of the most important things was that the shipmaster takes an active interest in the ongoing training of the crew onboard, he said.
Bergesen has also integrated messages from the company managing director, in the form of a video, into computer based training packages used onboard ships, as a means of motivating seafarers to use it.
Kevin Hewlett of Teekay shipping said that he has implemented 45-50 Seagull software modules onboard vessels. “The seafarers love it,” he said. “The masters say there isn’t enough computer capacity onboard for them all to use it as much as they want to.”
Online portals
There were presentations from 3 different portals: Kognita’s site4learning.com; The Nautical Institute’s Nauticalcampus.com; and the Kongsberg Norcontrol maritime-ecampus.com.
The site4learning.com has 30 major suppliers of e-learning putting their content on the portal, or linking to it from the portal.
Serge Cote, senior project manager e-learning with Kongsberg Maritime Ship Systems, talked about his project maritime-ecampus.com. Students and instructors can use the portal to work together, with instructors onshore assigning the student onboard ship training packages to work through. “Learning is a social process,” he said. “People rarely learn alone.”
One problem with having remote instructors communicating with the vessel is that seafarers are likely to want instant feedback on how well they have completed a module, and the instructor could well be in a different time zone and in bed.
Eventually training colleges could employ a network of instructors around the world to make sure there was always an instructor available to work with a student onboard ship.
It is difficult to use shipboard simulators together with remote instructors, because of the large amount of ship-shore data transfer required, he said. “Some simulator files get up to 300 kb,” he said. “It seems that the need for bandwidth is going up faster than the reducing cost is keeping up.”
However it is very dangerous training students using simulators without involving a remote instructor. “As soon as you’ve got a student doing it by himself there’s a problem of negative training,” he said. “He thinks he’s done it right but he hasn’t.”
“We don’t see e-learning as replacing full mission simulators in schools.”
Julie Lithgow, project director of the Nautical Institute’s Nautical Campus project, talked about how technology can help seafarers manage their careers. “We have 40 year old seafarers who phone the Nautical Institute to ask about their prospects for jobs ashore,” she said. “But our database provides this information for free.”
The Nautical Campus has an area geared towards continuous professional development (CPD) of seafarers, helping them think about a life career covering both their times onboard and ashore. “We need to encourage seafarers to take responsibility for their own career development,” she said.
“We want more seafarers in the shipping industry; we want them younger and motivated,” she said. “This industry needs to encourage cadets to join.”
Knowledge management
Knowledge management is all about helping shipping companies harness all of the intellectual capital in their organisations, helping seafarers work, in the words of Kognita’s John Douglas, “smarter, safer and simpler.”
Various different knowledge management systems have been around for a number of years, helping acquire and integrate data.
Scientia Technologies
Scientia Technologies of Vancouver, Canada, is developing a maritime engineering-based knowledge system, geared towards helping reduce errors in engineering projects.
The company anticipates having a product ready for shipmanagers in the first half of next year, available both over the internet (asp model) and on a self hosted basis. A pilot project is being developed with a group of shipping companies in the Pacific Northwest, with a view to rolling out to shipping companies in Europe when it is ready as the first target market.
The system will guide engineers through the process of putting a design together and help put the documentation together. It will gather knowledge from projects and enable this to be used in future projects, to avoid people making the same mistakes again.
“Bad definition of engineering runs to huge problems later on,” said Danek Kilinski. “
“Expert systems can catch errors sooner.”
The first task is to create knowledge bases, then work out ways to distribute this knowledge around the organisation.
The system should be able to help shipping companies reduce risk associated with a transaction.
“If there is any risk at all the supplier will put a 15 per cent onto the bid,” said Mr Riley. “If the risk is reduced, then the bid goes down.”
John Shearn, PFA Research
John Shearn, head of PFA Research, talked about how shipping companies can improve the use of information in their decision making, when sourcing projects.
One way to improve purchasing is to find better ways of involving the knowledge of people who are not actually working in the purchasing departments.
There are already many tools on the market which capture all the information involved in putting a contract together, with a view to simplifying the process of putting together the next one.
Shipping companies can make much better use of their intranets, he said; rather than just put static company information on them, they can be used to provide individual portals for each staff member. “We’re going towards a user configurable, portal that gives you own tasks,” he said.
Mr Shearn said that the development of Marine Trading Markup Language (MTML) has gone a long way to encourage users to adopt standard documentation formats, which is proving very useful.
Simon Courage, Manpower Software
Simon Courage talked about the software his company produces to help shipping companies schedule crew onto their ships.
The software is being used by three of the largest cruise shipping companies, including Sun Cruises and Royal Caribbean, which can have up to 800 staff onboard a single vessel.
Whilst the merchant sector has fewer staff per vessel, it still has problems scheduling staff when there are many different vessels in the fleet.
The company was originally founded in 1991, producing software and consultancy services for the defence industry, and discovered that its expertise could prove very valuable in the maritime sector.
The software replaces the white boards and computer spreadsheet packages which many shipping companies use to schedule their staff, with a dedicated software package.
“Spreadsheets are not designed to schedule crew,” said Mr Courage. “If the guy who invented the spreadsheet saw what they’re being used for, he’d be amazed.”
One of the best functions of the software is helping shipping companies make last minute changes to schedules, he said, for example if the ship’s itinerary changes, staff don’t show up for work or are off sick.
The Manpower software provides an integrated way to work out the best people for the job, making sure they all have the right visas, training and medical examinations for the task in hand.
The software can help shipping companies optimise the amount of money they spend on staff training. Currently, some shipping companies over train their staff, trying to get everyone with training to do different jobs, whilst others undertrain and then rush around at the last minute trying to find someone skilled to do the job. Both processes can involve the shipping company spending more money than it needs to.
The software can help shipping companies schedule their staff well in advance of the working shift. By scheduling crewmembers earlier, they can book flights earlier and typically get reduced cost tickets. The software can also find ways to minimise the amount of money shipping companies need to spend on travel, by helping them choose seafarers who reside near to the port where they will join the ship, or arranging that seafarers leave the ship when it is at a port nearer to where they live.
An advantage of a dedicated software system, rather than whiteboards and spreadsheets, is that everybody in the shipping company can see the information they need, including people on the ship itself and the training department. It ensures that they are all using the same information. The system can also generate all of the data required for audit purposes.
Also by having better control over the scheduling shipping companies can improve the service they provide to their crew, taking into account their preferences about what ships they want to be on.
Geir Michaelsen, BASS
Geir Michaels, business manager of maritime software company BASS, talked about the BASS Safir system to help shipping companies gather information about accidents which occur onboard ships and making sure that they do not re-occur.
The system can also help with analysis of incidents and look at the conditions behind it.
“Most ships today have an e-mail system,” Mr Michaelsen said. “But that is not enough. An e-mail system does not categorise the different events as to how serious they are.”
The software is designed to be as easy as possible for seafarers to use, and minimise the amount of information they need to type in. It was originally developed by a Norwegian shipping insurance company.
Jenny Pantelis, Ulysses Systems
Jenny Pantelis, solutions consultant with UK maritime software company Ulysses Systems, talked about how the Ulysses software can help a shipping company build up a “corporate memory”, gathering together useful knowledge from all over the organisation and managing it in a way that people can access it easily.
“It’s about utilising a company’s resources,” she said. “You spend a lot of money to train people to make decisions; we can help keep this knowledge within your company.”
The software means that staff can continually share and exchange information, even if they are continually travelling. “Superintendents are always travelling,” she said. “They need to have access to each other’s information.”
The system manages all the information generated and required onboard vessels. “On the vessel side, there’s an overload of information,” she said. “Seafarers work too hard on their everyday tasks, they do not need to be burdened with more work. If mariners have the knowledge, it should be used again.”
“The information has to be filed correctly,” she said. “People don’t have to know how a filing system works; the software must just be designed to have the information immediately available.”
“The most common thing we hear from seafarers is, ‘we need software that does the job I don’t want to do, not software that does my job,’” she said.
Ulysses places a great deal of emphasis on making sure the software is easy to use. “Software has a bad reputation onboard vessels,” she said. “You say you’re from a software company and people run away. You get just one chance to show them it’s an easy solution and then they’ll use it, it will make their life easier.”
Some seafarers are more open to using new software than others, she said. “I have found Indian crew are very open to new software. But it can take a bit more persuasion to get more senior people to use the system.”