132 Officers and crew from leading cruise and expedition operators have been involved in developing NAPA Checklist COMMENTARY Automating workflows to simplify safety management With human error causing casualties across an increasingly complex shipping industry, NAPA Checklist is tackling the threat of overwhelming procedures and paperwork SAMI KOPONEN Sami Koponen is product owner of safety solutions at NAPA, where he develops cloud solutions that translate complex safety needs into practical, userdriven technology 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 dayto-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
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NzQ1NTk=