Task Assistant Platform
Ulysses Task Assistant products help companies evolve so as to effectively comply with most kinds of managerial self-improvement targets and any new external regulations. Task Assistant assists in demonstrating continuous improvement which is increasingly emphasized in the industry especially with the recent legislation such as OCIMF with the TMSA.
Unlike existing software, which expects users to adapt their thinking to the navigational layout of the product, Ulysses software using highly configurable Task Orientation, matches the navigational layout to the way each role/user thinks through a process. This saves valuable time for multi tasking employees, which is by far the most costly expenditure in software lifecycle costs, while offering the highest level of process control.
The value of software in general lies in the degree to which it can improve process, and the degree to which it can support better user performance, for example by improving access to vast volumes of decision related information and knowledge. Different software systems provide vastly different degrees of usability thereby affecting ROI more than any other factor. Ulysses improves Usability by a quantum step via its unique Task Orientation giving 2 multiples of the ROI of competitive products.
Task Assistant for Planned Maintenance
The efficiency of a planned maintenance system can be the difference between smooth routine management and a labyrinth of confusion as to the real maintenance status of the vessel. The choice is an intuitive PMS system that actively supports and minimises reporting tasks of a tired and preoccupied engineer or one of the many rather inefficient alternatives such s spreadsheets or unintuitive software. Task Assistant implements planned maintenance without disrupting established practice and with the minimum of training and configuration resource. It assembles information from corporate experience at the point of need, shares it between staff on board and ashore without laborious communications and delivers efficiency and cost savings in spare parts inventories. Task Assistant releases key engineering staff from unproductive clerical chores and ensures that planned maintenance is the efficiency and safety tool that it is designed to be.
A few of our TA Planned Maintenance Features
Planned maintenance use on-board by office include:
- Task trees that are customized for each role and user
- Reporting, analyzing and scheduling defects
- Long-term view of the schedule
- Class survey records and scheduling
- Scheduling activities by calendar or running hours
- Critical activity management
- Actual work plan management including assigning and altering job
- View maintenance history and comments related to jobs
- Report maintenance completion (with comments and spares usage)
- Drawing from the inventory
- Machinery running hours maintained by reporting maintenance complete or as an independent task
- Set-up of components, activities and spares
Create Ship Working Model
- Available to the Technical Superintendent in the office who is responsible for overseeing the correct set-up of the maintenance system for each vessel in the company
- Maintenance components can be added from the Company Component List to individual ships. When a component is added to a ship, all the activities and spares are added, thus reducing the amount of repetitive work required when setting up several vessels.
- Spares and activities can be assigned to the ship maintenance components and are included in the maintenance scheduler.
- The hierarchical representation of the maintenance component tree defined during the task will be used during the context navigator for the ship and office-based systems.
Task Assistant for Crewing
By its nature, crew management continuously interacts with key functions of operations and company administration and with outside agencies and services. Its efficiency is as good as the information on which it acts in its key roles of crew recruitment, placing and support.
Directly assembled information, such as job specifications, is matched by background data on personnel performance and corporate HR experience. It's a potentially resource-hungry function that is directly addressed by Task Assistant's intuitive information management.
Corporate databases and relevant daily processes of accounting, operations and planning are brought together in Task Assistant's task monitoring and information is fed to the point of need in crew management. Job specifications and performance reviews, reports from ships officers, health and safety records and regulations, payroll and travel accounts: all have a bearing on crewing decisions. Task Assistant ensures that those decisions and processes are supported by timely and complete information without duplicated effort and with minimum data entry.
A few of our TA Crewing Features
Crew information and wage management for use on-board by office include:
Task trees that are customized for each role and user
Full support for crew recruitment process separating potential crew into the various stages of recruitment approval
Crew record recording and retrieval
Crew availability displays for ergonomic matching of available crews to vessels
Crew list generation
Master's General accounts for cash accounting, salaried and contractual personnel
Crew sign on/off with ability for masters to implement contractual crew terms and conditions of employment
Cash transactions
Bond sales with close integration to inventory management in Purchasing Module
Crew wages showing monthly
Ship-side closing which queues ship account information and wages for transmission to office system
Office-side crew wages and cash balance support
Office-side monthly account closing
Office-side wages management
Integrated Crew Scheduler
Task Assistant for Purchasing
Not just a backroom activity, purchasing is an integral and critical function of efficient and safe ship operations. Managing spares inventories onboard and ashore requires continuous information feeds from component operational experience, supplier performance records, spares stocks and voyage planning. Computerised systems take much of the information processing workload, but are only as good as those information feeds that still require manual processes that are vulnerable to error and omission and are not responsive to unpredictable operational issues.
Task Assistant reduces laborious manual procedures by intuitively capturing and processing relevant information during day to day operations. Valuable experience from the entire fleet is filtered and fed to support purchasing decisions. Supplier performance is monitored, changes in planned operations noted, spares consumption logged.
The result is the difference between countless man hours of form filling and a clear picture of current status, on demand. The difference between tying up cash in expensive surplus spares to cover for inefficient inventory control and being able to exploit just-in-time supply, with the optimum level of stock for safe operations. Not performing maintenance twice for lack of appropriate spares or incurring expensive airfreight. And knowing that purchasing is delivering process-compliant, cost-effective fleet support.
A few of our TA Purchasing Features
Purchasing process support on-board and crew include:
- Task trees that are customized for each role and user
- Spares and stores requisitioning
- Service requisitions
- Request for quotations (RFQs)
- Vessel direct requisitioning and RFQs
- Checking status of inventories and pending orders
- Quotations
- Approval work flows for selection, pricing, vendors, etc.
- Purchase orders
- Recording delivery and updating status of requisitions, orders and inventories
- Accountancy functions
- Invoicing - linking invoices to issued purchase orders
- Accrual report for period - Unpaid issued purchase orders
- Inventory management for spares and stores items
- Vendor management
Task Assistant Quality Safety and Operations
Ulysses uses its unique tasks orientation to manage documents flows in the enterprise as required for Quality Safety and Operations departments of shipping companies. Unlike conventional document management systems used by these departments, the Task Assistant provides an indexing system that vastly increases the value of document management, and vastly reduces the time needed to file or retrieve documents to achieve co-ordination.
- assembly of the corporate memory must not be a separate task from the day to day duties of company personnel: it must be a by-product of their work.
- the corporate experience must be efficiently managed and distributed in a form that convinces the relevant operator that, before each critical task, he must take it into account.
- it should be delivered at the relevant time to prevent a non-compliance or to support a critical action and in the context of the task in hand. In addition to the unique features that Task Orientation offers, the quality safety and operations module provide;
A few of our TA Quality and Safety Operations features
- Task trees customizable for each Role and User.
- Personal Username and password accessing system, with the ability to view/control/access other Roles depending on customizable authorization levels.
- Particular System (ship/office)/ Role/ Task/ Context and voyage specific information.
- Ability to integrate all your SMS system, ISPS and any electronic based Static information available to your company.
- Ability to navigate through specific manual sections related to each task and context, customized according to the company's needs and/or requirements.
- Ability to demonstrate the users' feedback on company information with the facility to create, view, and approve personal/general annotations and "suggestion for changes" for specific manual sections enabling the demonstration of continuous improvement of company procedures.
- Notification facility for the SMS suggestions made and changes implemented after their approval.
- Ability to demonstrate continuous improvement of company procedures with the facility to review a list of all the users' feedback (annotation types) collectively or individually on the company distributed SMS system.
- History/ Revision of manual updates and changes made.
- Advanced Word search facilities for manuals.
- Customized filing system, to receive and file documents automatically, tailored to file by each role's personal folder (Inbox, Outbox, Pending), vessel, voyage, task and context, according to the company's policy and requirements.
- Ability to complete and send forms from role to role through relevant task and context to other appropriate roles, task(s) and context(s), under a defined workflow.
- Analytical tracking information facility on completed documents being sent/ received and their current status. (i.e. "Creation role", "task", "context", "last modifying role", "workflow stage information", "filling information" etc).
- Periodic schedule alert facility for forms that need to be completed under a specific time frame.
- Ability to import and export documents with the TA.
- Ability to send messages via Outlook to be viewed by the appropriate external parties.
- Advanced task tree navigation and risk management capability, through various task search facilities, tailored to search for task(s) with unread messages.
- Ability to view scheduled forms by defined periods.
- Powerful Form search facility. A dynamic tool useful for auditing purposes where one can minimise the search and retrieval range and process, by filtering through various criterions.
- Ability to access and integrate other software applications (such as PMS, Purchasing Accounting, Port guides, Crewing etc) or electronic tools, which are necessary for execution at the time of performing a task
- Ability to make changes, in the manuals, forms, documents, workflows etc. and update the system on board and ashore automatically.
- Support of data forms (Info Path) which are cheaper when transma cheaper transmittion option, can also be easily analyzed in order to have reports on ship performances, machinery condition statistics or other valuable analytical and statistical data.
To learn more about Task Assistant, please use our interactive tool by selecting the Task Assistant logo.
