Software for marine, inspection and expert-services businesses
For the past two years I've been an engineer on a small development team for an international marine consultancy: surveyors, engineers and scientists handling casualties, claims and inspections around the clock, worldwide. I built and run the platform the whole firm works in, from the case record to the invoice, and a separate vessel-tracking and satellite-imagery tool for the analysts. It's the industry I know from the inside, and most of it still runs on Word templates and email. I also run my own AIS and ADS-B receivers at home and write about what they pick up in Wingmast.
Operations platform, international marine consultancy
50+ consultants and surveyors across multiple offices around the globe, one system for every job: case and claims records with vessels, parties and staff; a document store that mirrors the firm's own file server, with versioning and correspondence filed against the case; timesheets and expense claims that flow straight into invoices; nightly sanctions screening; and an AI assistant, inside Outlook, that briefs each user from their own mailbox and drafts replies they send themselves.
Every receipt is read and checked automatically: OCR, image forensics, duplicate detection and a reasoned flag for finance to review.
1 month → 1 day
Expense checking for the whole firm, before and after. The build paid for itself the first time it ran, and the admin team got most of a month back, every month, for work that actually needs a person.
Vessel tracking and satellite analysis tool
Voyage reconstruction from AIS and satellite trackers on an interactive map; satellite imagery tiled on demand over an incident position; oil-slick search from open detection data; vessel motion analysis from onboard sensor uploads. Results shareable with clients by a single link, no login.
- Case and claims managementOne record per job from instruction to invoice. Hull and machinery, cargo, casualty. Vessels, parties, correspondents and staff on the file; who's assigned, what's outstanding, what's been sent to whom.
- Survey and inspection recordsStructured capture on site instead of retyping from a notebook. Bunker, condition, on/off-hire, warranty: the same fields every time, searchable afterwards.
- Documents on your own file serverCase folders, versions and correspondence kept on the storage you already own, indexed and searchable from the case, with a full audit trail of who did what.
- Time, expenses and invoicingTimesheets and expense claims that become client invoices without a spreadsheet in between. Receipts read and checked automatically for amounts, dates, duplicates and tampering.
- Sanctions and compliance screeningVessels, owners and counterparties checked against the current lists, refreshed nightly, every search logged for the auditor.
- Vessel tracking and casualty mappingAIS and satellite tracker data on an interactive map, satellite imagery over the incident, oil-slick search, and motion analysis from onboard sensors. Shareable with clients by link.
- AI assistants on your own dataMorning briefings and draft replies inside Outlook, receipt and document checks. Every action logged, nothing sent without a human.
- Connecting the restMicrosoft 365, file servers, accounting and the odd legacy system that nobody wants to touch, talking to each other so people don't have to.
Marine surveyors and consultancies, P&I correspondents, salvage and offshore inspection firms. Also loss adjusters, forensic engineers, asset and building inspectors: any expert business whose work is a stream of jobs, evidence and reports.
