By
Guest contributor |
For today’s shipping industry, paperwork is a risk, not just an administrative burden. The sector has become effective at preventing major disasters, with total ship losses falling to a record low in 2024. Yet over the same period, reported incidents rose by roughly 10 per cent to 3,310, according to Allianz’s Safety and Shipping Review 2026. Fewer ships are lost than ever, while more day-to-day things are going wrong.
The pattern is visible in the numbers. In the European Maritime Safety Agency’s Annual Overview of Marine Casualties and Incidents 2025, 43.6 per cent of the safety recommendations issued between 2015 and 2024 dealt with ship-related procedures: a step missed, taken out of order, or signed off before it was done. Meanwhile, The impact of maritime decarbonisation on wellbeing survey by the International Seafarers Welfare & Assistance Network found that 54 per cent of seafarers reported a heavier workload as decarbonisation and new regulations increase compliance requirements.
When procedures fail, it is tempting to call that human error, but in reality, it’s cognitive overload. New vessels, fuels, technology and regulations are arriving faster than crews can be trained, and each one adds another layer of procedures and processes. The real risk is not the officer who skips a step, but the officer with no capacity left to notice that something was missed.
Compounding the issue of growing complexity is the fact that most onboard operational processes still run on paper, or digital forms that simply mirror the paper on a screen. Updating these records depends entirely on individual discipline and knowledge of the process. But these solutions were never built for today’s operational reality, which involves frequent crew rotations, managing complex and fast-changing compliance needs and no room for error. As a result, steps get skipped or done out of sequence, signatures are forgotten, and a missed entry only surfaces afterwards in an audit or investigation. Static paper is no longer fit for modern ship operations.
NAPA’s new solution, NAPA Checklist, is designed to address this directly, replacing paper and static PDF checklists with guided, automated workflows for safer operations and easier compliance.
This is a meaningfully different approach from merely digitising a form, which changes nothing on its own. Instead, the new NAPA Checklist builds digital workflows tailored to the fleet’s Safety Management System (SMS) and guides the crew through each procedure in the correct order with the current approved checklist built into the task. Every action is recorded, time-stamped and attributed as the work happens.
With NAPA Checklist, the report becomes a by-product of doing the job rather than a task to complete after it. It is most beneficial for new officers, because the system carries the standard instead of assuming the person already knows it.
The gain compounds when the record is connected. Completed checklists flow into NAPA Logbook and the shoreside NAPA Fleet Intelligence platform, removing a second round of data entry. Shore teams can see checklist status across a fleet in real time without calling the ship, and time-stamped, named records are ready for class and Port State Control on request.
The real test for maritime software is whether it is adopted by the crew – tools that are quietly abandoned fail regardless of how capable they are. NAPA Checklist has been developed with help from officers and crew from leading cruise and expedition companies, and is already being used by four operators, one of which has run it onboard for over a year. HX Expeditions co-developed the product and is rolling it out across its expedition fleet.
“Operating in remote environments requires a balance of consistency and practical flexibility,” says Vsevolod Pashkov, maritime compliance manager and company security officer at HX Expeditions. “We co-developed NAPA Checklist because we wanted a tool built around how our crews actually work. We expect it to bring greater consistency and efficiency to daily operations onboard, reduce duplicate admin, and improve real-time information flow between ship and shore.”
Alongside NAPA Permit to Work, NAPA Checklist represents a shift in approach, away from adding new systems and towards simplifying the SMS itself. The SMS exists to make ships safer, but when it becomes a paperwork exercise, it starts to work against the crew it was built to protect. Guided workflows reverse that, putting the procedure back into the task and taking the paperwork out of the way. That is where the next decade of operational safety will be won, one guided task at a time.
Sami Koponen is product owner of safety solutions at NAPA, where he develops cloud solutions that translate complex safety needs into practical, user-driven technology