We are continuously upgrading Cloud Fleet Manager, adding new functionality, enhancements and improving the overall usability. With this article, we would like to give you a brief overview of some of the greater edits to the system. For a comprehensive overview of all changes, you can visit the “What’s New” report in Cloud Fleet Manager at any time to see what exactly happened in each of our modules.
New features
CFM Crewing is your one-stop solution to handle all crew-related tasks centrally and in an intuitive way. From master data management of seafarers, planning the crews on board as well as their relief, the management of working and rest hours of the crew up to managing payrolls, everything can be done in one single solution.
- When handling the payments of your crews, high bank charges may apply for the individual transactions. To reduce transferring fees for you and to make the process simpler and easier to understand, we have implemented several updates and improvements. With the updated version of the bank payments feature within CFM Crewing, you can now easily create bank files for your manning agency as the remittee (lump sum payments) so that they can handle domestic payments on your behalf. Effectively reducing the administrative burden for your accounting department and reducing your transaction expenses.
CFM Inventory allows you to keep track of all equipment, materials or supplies in stock on individual vessels - regardless of where they are located across your fleet. You can easily define various storage locations on board your vessels and categorise your stock, either by using pre-defined categories from settings or by simply specifying your own on the fly.
- To ensure data integrity of customer-created inventories, we adjusted the permissions settings for users of the module. You can now specify that only certain ranks have the option to edit inventory items or groups. This new feature ensures that only the relevant users in your company have access to critical features and your inventory structure is kept in place.
Enhancements
In addition to the changes above, we made the following enhancements to the system:
CFM Accommodations lets you easily manage the cabins and bunks on board your vessels as well as arrange respective cleaning or maintenance services. Just like our other modules, CFM Accommodations offers a variety of options for the export of data. Thus, allowing you to process the data in other systems or use them for other purposes.
- Planning the allocation of your crew onboard and managing changes in cases of signoffs can be a time-consuming task. To reduce manual effort for the master on board, the system now automatically removes seafarers from cabins that are signing off the vessel.
- Additionally, we adjusted the permission settings. As a system administrator, you can now manage permissions to provide specific ranks with the rights to access functions and perform actions. Thus, you ensure that only qualified personnel can access critical functions of the module.
- To further improve user experience and enhance clarity, an info icon is now available on the 'Directory' subtab. It displays a legend of the colour indicators and icons used for cabin planning. The legend allows the user to easily understand the different statuses of the cabins.
- A new full-text search is now available on the 'Timeline' subtab allowing you to enter the name of the desired cabin and find it quickly in a long list of cabins. This feature reduces time and effort to scroll through a long timeline with a lot of cabins and improves the user experience.
- A new search bar is available at the top of the 'Cleaning Services' table to allow you to find the cleaning service that you want to modify or export easily. The former 'Text Filter' in the filter pop-out has been removed.
CFM Cashbox & Bonded Store makes it much easier to handle cash on board. Just setup your default currency cashboxes ashore and synchronise to your fleet. For a smooth transition from paper to digital work, your crew only needs to register the initial balance and is immediately ready. Cashbox allows you to keep track of all cashbox transactions and raise a cash to master request when new money is needed. Bonded Stores seamlessly integrates with Cashbox and assists you to register all transactions in your on-board shop.
- A new API is available that provides transaction data from CFM Cashbox & Bonded Store.
CFM Certificates ensures that you all your necessary certificates are up to date and this way, that your vessels are seaworthy. It provides you with various options for the setup of certificate types, such as pre-warning periods, categorization on revalidation (on expiry, annual or intermediate surveys), definition of port- or flag-state requirements, or the assignment of responsibilities.
- You can now filter the vessel certificates according to their statuses and thus quickly grasp which certificates are due to expire soon, are expired already, or are generally missing.
CFM Crewing
- To reduce the workload for colleagues in the office and make the rating process of crew members’ performances easier, we refined the process and corresponding permissions. Performance reports can now directly be confirmed by the crew onboard and no longer require a confirmation from the office if a minimum rating score was achieved. To activate this setting for your company, please contact the support team.
- It is now possible to upload multiple documents to the performance report of a seafarer.
- Additionally, you can now display a detailed description of an assessment scale item in the tooltip of performance reports. Please contact our support team if you want to activate this feature.
- A dedicated permission is available allowing users to update seafarer bank details used in confirmed allotments. A confirmation to update these is still required to avoid accidental updates.
- The time period in which schedules are considered for the sign-on and sign-off of seafarers can now be configured by the support team. It can be extended to +/- 30 days. Users can now see the available schedules of the next 30 days when clicking on the sign-on or sign-off schedule.
- A new setting is available allowing you to prohibit users from approving incomplete rest hour periods. Contact the support team if you want to apply the setting.
- To better reflect everyday operations, we updated the options to define pay codes and how they are displayed. Earnings and deductions are mostly defined as monthly rates based on a 30-days assumption. In certain cases, however, it is required to define some or all pay codes as daily rates based on the individual shipping business. Therefore, we recently introduced this option to CFM Crewing. With this update for our module, payroll pay codes that were defined as daily rates are now also displayed in the new group "Daily Rates". Thus, providing users with a good overview on pay codes defined as monthly pro-rated, monthly absolute, daily rates, or any manually added additional earnings or deductions. Furthermore, the existing payroll settings in the software on board were extended so that the new group "Daily Rates" can be either shown (default setting) or hidden on customer request.
CFM Disturbance Report lets your crew easily create detailed, standardised service requests that can be directly assigned to the person responsible and which will then appear automatically within their dashboard. You can follow-up all service requests in a Kanban view, which gives you a full transparency an all pending requests and their individual status.
- You can now sort disturbance tickets in ascending and descending order on the 'Colleagues' and 'Vessels' tab.
CFM Emergencies lets you define different categories of emergencies and their corresponding tasks as well as to define if they are mandatory or not - all in line with both SOLAS and MARPOL. The respective locations onboard where the task needs to be carried out can be defined as well. Making sure that your crew is immediately aware of what to do and where to go.
- You can now add alarm sounds and instructions to your emergency categories under Settings > Duties > Emergency Categories in CFM Emergencies. The entries are then also reflected in the muster list export of the corresponding emergency category in CSM Emergencies. This feature ensures that you are compliant to SOLAS regulations and the seafarers on board understand the alarm signals and follow instructions as indicated.
- When seafarers have been signed off a vessel using CFM Crewing, they will now be automatically removed from lifeboats allocated to them and if applicable, from any mandatory duties.
- A new full-text search is now available on the 'Timeline' subtab allowing you to enter the name of the desired cabin and find it quickly in a long list of cabins. This feature reduces time and effort to scroll through a long timeline with a lot of cabins and improves the user experience.
CFM Incidents enables you to seamlessly document any incidents or near-misses that occurred on board your vessels. After an event has been documented, corrective or preventive actions can be defined as well and are then automatically synchronised with the office.
To enhance usability and enable users to focus on their essential tasks without the need to search for information, we added a new list to the dashboard “Incidents assigned to me”. This new list provides users with a single overview of the incidents, corrective actions and preventive actions assigned to them.
You can now filter the 'Corrective Actions' & 'Preventive Actions' lists on the dashboard for all open corrective/preventive actions or the corrective/preventive actions assigned to the logged-in user. This filter allows you to get a quick overview of your responsibilities and where you need to take action.
CFM Procedures enables you to send instructions to your vessels fast and easily, making sure that your fleet is up to date regarding e.g. safety instructions - achieving compliance with ease. Effortlessly send company policies and work instructions, or assign responsibilities aboard your ships.
- To ease communication on specific forms or procedures, we enhanced our options for commenting and exchange of information between office and vessels. You can now add comments to both procedures and forms, reply to comments and will automatically receive notifications for new comments that are relevant for you. With this update it is now possible for employees in the office and crews at sea to directly communicate on the respective forms or procedures that are automatically synchronised to further streamline processes.
CFM Risk Assessment enables you to organise your risk assessment digitally and minimise manual effort. Determine probabilities and implications of unwanted incidents and allocate danger levels to every thinkable situation on board. Be on the safe side concerning insurances. With our modular design, you can create and assess any number of operations.
- It is now possible to enter initial and residual risks when adding or editing hazards. This feature is available both in the office and at sea.
- You can now search the available list of operations by typing a keyword in the field 'Operation' and the system automatically provides you with a list of matching suggestions.
CFM Templates is the collection of all your templates. Hamper differences in layouts and simplify the understanding on both your customers’ and your side. We offer you all templates for the respective departments of your company. Whether employment contracts, order forms, voyage or time charter invoices, vacation requests or generic forms: With CFM Templates you are all geared up.
- The 'Employment Contract' and 'Letter of Guarantee' templates for CFM Crewing were extended with a new field: SEAMAN_SEX.
- Additionally, the merge fields 'Vessel IMO' and 'Company' are now available in the 'Seafarer Card' template - Table PASTSEASERVICES.
Cloud Ship Manager (CSM) integrates your fleet directly into all processes, is intuitively usable and enables your crew, to capture data at sea and to forward it to the office. Through this, your crew on board and your personnel on shore fuse to jointly acting teams.
- Once a new CSM update is available, the system now notifies the users immediately and not just after launching the CSM client. This allows them to directly install the new version or postpone the update. This feature avoids issues with CSM clients that are constantly running and thus were not notified about an update before.