The company said that it started this service to drive up quality, identify, measure and reduce risks and to eliminate costly man-hours associated with performance and inspection results analysis.
Tanker operators, who have struggled for nearly 20 years to deal with SIRE and other inspection regimes, can now take advantage of what is claimed to be a world class software application.
OceanFile is the culmination of a three-year development project to develop software to ease the burdens associated with oil company vetting programmes and inspections.
It is a web-based application, integrating all of the key functions associated with the major tanker inspection programmes. Of great importance, OceanFile discounts the widelyheld industry obsession that counts the number of inspector observations as a critical KPI, the company said.
OceanFile is claimed by its founders to go to the heart of risk assessment; using tools that both forecast the ‘potential risk’ associated with the inspection report questions and measure an ‘assessed risk’ that scores the actual words of each inspector observation.
A comprehensive range of user-defined charts are simply created using the OceanFile Chart Wizard, with filters to select date range, IMO vessel types, sister vessels, personnel, etc.
The problems of keeping track of historical report observations (and equally importantly, the operator comments that responded to them) are eliminated with the OceanFile observation history tool that lists every instance of observations associated with each inspection report question, the company explained.
The ability to search and display performance results for individual vessels, sisterships, vessel types, regional managing offices and personnel responsibilities, are just some of the system’s many features.

Like its charting functions, the OceanFile reporting tool offers numerous user-defined management reports to demonstrate performance across many aspects of vetting, inspection, vessel, fleet and personnel.
When charterers pose the “Show me!” “Prove it” questions to demonstrate performance and quality, this no longer need induce a frenzy of effort to turn out graphs and reports, as the answers are just a click, or two away, the company claimed.


OceanFile has already enjoyed a very positive reception. “The number of operators who have already subscribed to OceanFile since its launch tells us that it delivers what the operator needs. We have had a great deal of very positive feedback and with suggestions for additional features already coming in, regular enhancements will be made during the coming months,” said co-founder David Savage.
OceanFile is a subscription-based product and available for free trial at www.oceanfile.com. A standard package can be offered, which can be designed to suit a particular operator and his or her fleet.
Both the company’s co-founders- Savage and David Sanderson - were previously involved with the SIRE database.
As part of their remit, they used to visit many tanker operators’ offices when undertaking Lloyd’s Register’s vetting and inspection courses and found just how many man hours this was taking up with little, or no, automation.
The prototype was launched last September then a production model was trialed during the first week in January this year.
Rather than compete with SIRE, the new database complements it to help tanker operators in vetting, risk assessments, etc on a recall basis with details of previous SIRE inspections, inspectors observations, etc. Operators comments can also be incorporated, the company explained.