With 90% of the world's economy reliant on vessel transportation, our responsibility is considerable but somewhat complicated to address. With so many moving parts to the industry, improving communication and collaboration across organisations and government bodies will be key to witnessing any real change.
Partnerships lie at the core of Seall's values as a business. We use these relationships to continually cultivate opportunities to improve our products and services and encourage better practice and forward thinking within navigation. The introduction of the UKHO's Admiralty Digital Delivery Service (ADDS) programme has been a solid cornerstone in our recent business development roadmap. This new cloud-based file store allows our server to collect real-time data by API and pass it on to our customers directly.
It removes the inaccurately labelled "Weekly Update" procedure and instead replaces it with a more direct approach that will offer vessels immediate access to chart data as and when it becomes available.
Fully integrating this ADDS solution with our newfront-end Auto Update software feature allows our products to carry out updates and corrections entirely and autonomously. Direct access to data as and when it becomes available means steady, continuous updating rather than one sizeable weekly data dump. Invaluable for vessels who can only receive a certain level of data while at sea, but also for the broader goal of ship management.
The potential here means that Superintendents can rely on our products to ensure that entire fleets, no matter the size, consistently reference the most up-to-date publications and data needed for their safe navigation. Coupled with Seall's Automatic Reporting gives the shore team complete visibility of this comprehensive data management onboard and allows event-driven decisions to be made with ease.
Better still, it requires no disruptive software updates or changes; it's a simple licence upgrade providing immediate and complete accessibility for our customers. Functioning as a simple toggle button within our Data Management module, once applied, the application will continually check for updates against the latest permit for the Vessel throughout the day with no disruption to the product's usability. Because Seall allows Chart Agents to send vessel permits directly to our server, any additional charts ordered by the Vessel will also be automatically retrieved and updated on the vessel's hardware as they become available to that vessel. This functionality, in conjunction with our inbuilt ENC order basket, means that Seall customers truly have a world of data at their fingertips.
The reason to harness development towards the usage of AVCS is apparent. Their ENC coverage globally stands far above any other competing services, which is why Ship Management companies put so much trust in organisations like the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office (UKHO). Aside from meeting the latest mandated data protection standard from the International Hydrographic Organisation (IHO), vessels utilising this data also receive a UKHO certificate that can be used during local inspections and confirms that all the Electronic Navigational Charts in AVCS onboard satisfy the requirements of SOLAS Chapter V.
Furthermore, the Admiralty Information Overlay(AIO) is a unique additional navigational data overlay that can be essential to comprehensive passage planning. It also contains Temporary and Preliminary Notices to Mariners, illustrating navigationally significant differences between ENCs and their paper chart counterparts. Having immediate access to the updates to data will not only mean that manpower can be redirected from the tedious administration of data updates towards voyage planning but also drastically improves the safety and compliance status of the company's vessels by ensuring this consistent and reliable telemetric. Delivered in industry-standard S-63/S-57 format, guarantees that this consistently supplied data has complete compatibility with all type-approved ECDIS. An important consideration for larger fleets that may have multiple and varying hardware onboard.
More specifically, the commercial and management benefits that can be harnessed by providing immediate access to global routes and port data changes mean that transportation can be streamlined fleet-wide instead of on a per-vessel approach. Necessary changes to voyages can be planned and executed with ease, and port inspections can be effortless with the right access to data onboard. The recent health crisis illustrated just how significant an immediate and unified response is to the survival and development of global business and event-driven decisions that can truly improve a voyage and the overall ship management need to be made in the same manner. With the right information at the right time, not a week later when the changes to those charts go online and not with predictive guesswork. The ability to access and share data so seamlessly is a reality in the industry now and should be utilised across the board to create better ship-to-shore communication and voyage collaboration. Adopting new digital technology to promote maritime autonomy, like Admiralty's Digital Delivery Service, is a crucial step associated with these necessary changes and one we should all be employing.
