Ship Admin System Application Support Case Study

The Client

The Client is a global shipping company that serves the world’s leading oil and gas companies.

With over 6000 employees in offices worldwide and a fleet of over 150 ships, the client requires consistently reliable software support and maintenance.

The Challenge

Our client needed application support for the Ship Administration System (SAS) and XML tool that they use to manage various activities onboard all of their vessels.

The SAS records the data of crew members, primarily looking at their work hours and accounts. For example, the SAS adds and deducts money used for laundry allowances, catering allowances, radio charges, overtime hours, special remittance, additional allowances and special allowances on a crew member’s account. It also records any cash advances crew members take.

In particular, the SAS is meant to administer the seafarers’ travel documents when the vessel they are traveling on enters a new country.

The Process

  1. End users report issues.
  2. Log the issue into the ticket tracking system and notify the vessel.
  3. Investigate and resolve the issue.
  4. Confirm that the issue is resolved with the user.

How Optimus Helped

Optimus provides the primary application support for the SAS and XML tool. The crew members are usually the application’s end users so they contacted us directly by email or call for any required support work.

We troubleshoot any problems by analyzing the issue and send a set of steps to resolve the issue back to the crew member that contacted us.

As well, our team works with the client’s onshore functional team when resolving any legacy issues from previous versions of the application and for adding or upgrading features to the application.

We ensure that quality services are being delivered by making modifications on a test server, which is an exact replica of the application’s running environment, before implementing the change on the real server.

Optimus is in continuous touch with the client via weekly calls.