Are You Chained Down by Vessel Questionnaire Management?
AXSQ is the solution to an industry-wide problem
A time- and resource-consuming chore
Ask any ship professional in the world and chances are they will have plenty of ideas how they could alternatively utilize the resources they have currently devoted towards filling out and maintaining the questionnaires for their ships. Whether you are managing a vessel’s questionnaire database internally, or outsourcing this task, it often ends up being time-consuming and inefficient.
Current industry practices require owners and operators to keep accurate technical specs, commercial information, and various certificates for each of their vessels, ready and available to be shared with brokers, agents and charterers on a moment's notice. Furthermore, the chain of communication is extensive, which means that a single typo could necessitate in the restarting of the entire process across multiple stakeholders around the world.
Sailing through the fog of inefficiency
So how do you navigate this information congestion? Thankfully, a solution by AXSMarine has been designed to replace the cumbersome email process of questionnaire and document management. AXSQ is a secure, cloud-based solution, which allows the stakeholders to access the latest ship documentation from a single source. All stakeholders in the communication chain - owners, managers, brokers, charterers, captains and port agents - can directly benefit from AXSQ now.
AXSQ – a Smart Solution
The latest addition to the company's portfolio provides you with multiple customizable questionnaire formats, automated data entry, management and protection through public and private modes within a single source application. Its functionalities include industry standard and customer built questionnaires required for fixture recap. A virtually unlimited library of formats available to the user minimizes the need for manual data entry, with each filled-in questionnaire facilitating the faster and automated creation of the next one.
Connected to the ship
AXSQ auto-populates new questionnaires with source vessel information at the click of a finger. If updates are required, these can be completed by the captain offline using a simple offline form, which is returned by email to the office and imported to the clients AXSQ vessel questionnaire database, which can take minutes.
File management rethought and redesigned
With its file management functionalities, as well as options for both offline data flow and email utilization, AXSQ is a powerful tool capable of performing multi-role tasks in a variety of shipping organizations worldwide. You have full transparency of where and how your data is saved, as well as who can administer it via AXSQ permission sets.
AXSQ stores a full history on each vessel, available for transparency, traceability and compliance to make the audit process easier. The administration layers within the application enable users to keep control of their data through the assignment of different roles and rights. People can be given access only to the features they need, allowing for the restriction of sensitive data on a "need to know" basis.
The response to an industry-wide challenge
In the words of AXSMarine CEO, Jacques Goudchaux, the cumbersome nature of current questionnaire filling and sharing practices was pointed as one of the most frustrating problems in the modern-day shipping by a majority of their customers:
"AXSQ is a smart system, guaranteeing a modern, structured and optimized database organization, which allows the coordination of identical value fields, as well as the detection and correlation of questions styled differently across multiple questionnaire formats. The advanced technical description searches and PDF exports embedded in our system will enable you to keep a user-friendly format of your online questionnaires."
Further details about AXSQ are available here.
About AXSMarine
Founded in 2000, AXSMarine is a global provider of online software solutions to the international shipping industry and is trusted by more than 10,000 users worldwide. Its software solutions deliver remarkable efficiency to commercial chartering processes in Dry, Tanker, and Containership chartering. These products provide a suite of modules, which allow shipping executives to fully analyse their commercial and operational activities. All web-based, services are accessible from any computer, anywhere; without additional downloads or installation. AXSMarine online tools are secure, fast and easy to use. With AXSMarine, professionals work faster, manage more efficiently and plan better. The company is headquartered in Paris, France and operates offices in London, Singapore, Sofia and Stamford, CT. To find out more, please visit: www.axsmarine.com
The opinions expressed herein are the author's and not necessarily those of The Maritime Executive.