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Helm: Software Making Waves

Tugboats might seem like the last place to look for innovative information technology. But Edoc Systems Group $($

www$.$helmoperations.com$),$ a company with headquarters in Victoria, B$.$C$.,$ recognized the potential of information technology to automate business processes in this industry.

Tugboat companies are often family businesses that have been running for more than $100$ years using paper$-$based systems. Things do not change quickly in this industry. For example, a Helm employee visiting an Oregon company found that the dispatch log sheet the company was currently using had been in use in the same format since $1952!$ How can information technology help this industry?

The first step is to understand the challenges the tugboat companies face. Each company has a fleet of vessels, a set of crews that run the vessels, and a list of jobs from various customers that need to be done. The dispatcher is the person at the centre of the business process that matches jobs with crews and vessels. It is a complicated process in which new jobs come in daily, vessels and crews have different capabilities, and customers have different priorities. Tugboats are also expensive $($a tugboat can cost upward of $$5$ milition and require thousands of dollars per day to run$).$ Dispatchers require years of experience before they are ready to balance these factors and make efficient scheduling decisions.

Paper$-$based systems worked for decades, but they were relatively inefficient and prone to error. Why? To understand this, you need a more detailed view of the process: It began with a customer order $($usually via phone or fax$).$ An employee at the tug company wrote down the work that needed to be done; that description would then be rewritten and handed to tug captains as a job to do; dispatchers would copy it again onto the dispatch log sheet. When the job was completed, the captains handed their log sheets back to the dispatchers. Dispatchers reviewed the sheets and sent a delivery notice to their customer. The log sheets would then get passed to accounting staff, who rewrote $($or retyped$)$ the entire job into an invoice and sent it out. Finally, the accountant would have to re$-$enter all the invoicing details into the accounting system.

Each job, therefore, was handwritten seven different times by at least four different people. Each written entry not only took a good deal of time but was also prone to copying errors.

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