Oceanopedia

Inspiration

Logbooks are an essential part of daily routines carried out onboard ships as they help in keeping together all crucial records and parameters for future reference. It is a challenging job wherein the responsible person has to ensure that the ship is navigating safely on the correct path and complying with all the navigational rules i.e. Rules of the Road (ROR). Not only is safe navigation the prime responsibility but its documentation also holds equal importance to lend credibility and accountability to the task being executed.

Accountability for shipboard operations is of umpteen importance; in that, the tasks that are carried out as well as the existing conditions they are carried out under have to be recorded in order to have a formal/official document supporting the efficiency and reasoning behind the job that has been undertaken. In case of an unfortunate incident, it is this record that lends credibility to insurance claims and thereby ensures that the competency of the officer recording the incident can be measured and a judgment reached accordingly.

The logbook is used to record various data, scenarios, and situations (including emergency situations and actions) which are later used for reference, case studies and for marine insurance purposes in case of damage to the ship or loss of ship’s property should be properly filled out without any errors.

What it does

Ship Industry problems and what opportunities lie in e-signatures:

1. 90% of all seagoing ships still use paper logbooks for navigation and manoeuvre operations.
2. eLog solutions require huge maintenance costs and a learning curve.
3. But Insurance policies do require a paper logbook
4. Negligence results in one or more severe accidents

Using e-sign we can not only save time but delegate tasks to crew members, authorized signatories and required persons without the need to carry the physical documents/logbook thus saving it from any tampering or counterfeit activities, negligence, etc. Also, e-sign reminders would help to solve negligence problems. Such a solution would require minimum cost and setup time since the workflow remains the same, the crew and master of the ship still have their power of signatures and traditional way of logging things.

How we built it

Firstly, we create a template for our use case using the HelloSign template manager

Once the template is ready we can call the template using authorized signatories' detail from python SDK. We have three parties in action:

• Crew Members
• Security Officer
• Master of the ship

client = HSClient(api_key=st.secrets["hs_api_key"])

if st.button("Start Logbook Entry"):
    if ship_master != "" and ship_master_email != "" and ship_safety_officer != "" and ship_safety_officer_email != "" and ship_crew_engineer != "" and ship_crew_engineer_email != "":
        signature_request_id = client.send_signature_request_with_template(
            test_mode=True,
            template_id='9b28e75212e1cc6c2da95ce1a8f9d5ce07fe06fe',
            title='Ship Operations Logbook Record',
            subject='Daily ship maintenance and journey record for insurance, safety and crew purposes.',
            message='Required signatories are requested to verify all details carefully and sign the document.',
            signers=[
                { 'role_name': 'Crew Member', 'email_address': ship_crew_engineer_email, 'name': ship_crew_engineer },
                { 'role_name': 'Safety Officer', 'email_address': ship_safety_officer_email, 'name': ship_safety_officer },
                { 'role_name': 'Master', 'email_address': ship_master_email, 'name': ship_master }
            ]
        )
        st.write(signature_request_id)

I ran a test to see how would the final document look like after all parties have signed, and it looked as natural as handwritten record =)

Also, another feature I liked about HelloSign is Audit Trail which brings more transparency and security, so there is a lesser chance for counterfeits and tampering as the document doesn't have to move around physically.

The implementation is quite simple since all the major features are already available with HelloSign SDKs.

Challenges I ran into

I have no knowledge of design, or UI/UX so it was a tough decision for me to participate in this contest ;)

The API is quite amazing and simple to play with but most of my time was invested in analyzing different businesses and the overall impact e-signature solutions would provide. To be honest, the technology is simple but the choice of implementation would only unleash the importance of e-signatures and filling forms on the go.

What I learned

I am happy that I was able to check and brainstorm multiple ideas with HelloSign and finally settled for this one, on revolutionizing logbook recording on ships using HelloSign Technology.

What's next for Oceanopedia

Next, I am going to add searching, filtering, sensor metric dashboards and crew availability and task management to this app as the improved version after this hackathon.

Built With

• hellosign
• python
• streamlit