About Anglo-Eastern Ship Management
Anglo-Eastern Ship Management Limited is a ship management company focusing on managing commercial ships. It helps ship owners (direct clients) to ensure ships documentation necessary for trading requirements, maintenance, voyages, staffing, regulatory conformities, legal requirement, and maintenance will be operationally sound. As a ship management, it is at our utmost concerns to operate at the port or at sea. This entails huge documentation such as safety manuals, crew documents, forms and reports to and from the ships to office and vice versa which requires tracking and analysis to meeting regulatory requirements and performance monitoring.
Anglo-Eastern Ship Management Limited Using GroupDocs.Comparison
Apol Villamor, Senior IT Manager, 13 April 2018
Problem
In this kind of industry, transferring, maintaining and updating of documents to and from multiple commercial ships are enormous and complex processes. Document handling overall is a “pulling teeth” in terms of organizing, search and tracking. Therefore, the IT department put forward an initiative to build a document management system (Nautic Systems) to handle document processes in a more structured and efficient way.
Solution
We, the development team in IT department, chose “GroupDocs.Comparison” to leverage as an API tool incorporated in our Nautic System providing not only on development efficiency but also a highly intuitive document comparison and changes tracking within the document versions that currently most of the controlled document is needed. This achieves the increase of efficiency for about 90% on processing the documents and eliminates back and forth revisions between processors, checkers and approvers.
Figure 1: Document version comparison
Figure 2: Comparison result
Experience
Our development platforms (.NET) truly matched with the GroupDocs API providing the complete document solutions and tools delivering core requirements of the business-user. GroupDocs are very lenient to provide a temporary license to be used for development testing without the trial limitations. The support response turn over to our query is swift and friendly and willing to give ample time to fully test the product until it reaches our satisfaction. They are not going to push you to pay until we are satisfied with the result and expectation. Since the initiative has a very limited time to market requirements, other products are not being benchmarked as GroupDocs alone can provide all we need.
The development time incorporating the API took us a week to complete, although meeting some of the challenges like the generation of comparison results for certain document formats. However, the technical support quickly responded to our technical inquiries which the issue has been resolve at the right time.
Next Steps
We will be utilising other products such a search, annotation and watermarking of controlled documents and manuals in the next version and the same will be incorporated in the Nautic System. Also, GroupDocs.Comparison roadmap to expand its functionality on comparing various documents across different storage locations.
Summary
Developing document management for maritime industry is quite challenging, it involves uncommon workplaces such as the ships that are continuously moving around 4 oceans. Transferring of documents across multiple ships coming from various offices (back and forth) requires functionalities that provide efficiency on the processes in a reasonable and timely fashion. GroupDocs bridges that gap by providing useful and powerful API to deliver the document functionalities necessary to provide a quick and timely response to the ship’s operations that is the lifeblood of our business.