MarineIT / By situation / Leaving a legacy VMS
Renewal · Replacement · Second system
It is accurate as of whenever somebody last typed into it.
The structural issue
The record is downstream of the truth.
Every voyage system has the same weakness, and it is not in the software. It is in the gap in front of it.
What that gap costs
Latency. The system is behind reality by however long it takes someone to update it, which is longest exactly when the desk is busiest.
Partial entry. Under pressure, the fields that matter get typed and the rest do not. Complete enough to work from; not complete enough to defend a claim with.
Transcription error. A draft transposed, a tolerance dropped, a laytime term simplified. Rare individually; certain across a year.
Nothing before the fixture. The enquiry, the tonnage search, the three rounds of counters — none of it exists in the system, so none of it is available afterwards.
The alternative
Remove the gap rather than bridging it.
The obvious answer is an integration between the email layer and the voyage system. It is also where most of the remaining problems come from.
Two systems, one connector
An email tool parses the circular and pushes the values into the voyage system across an interface. Better than typing. But the connector has to be configured and maintained, field mappings re-tested when either side upgrades, failed pushes are frequently silent, and you now have two vendors, two roadmaps and two support queues. The two systems can still disagree — the disagreement is just now somebody's job to detect.
Two surfaces, one record
Nothing inside the platform is integrated. They read and write the same cargo, vessel, counterparty and voyage rows. A parsed circular is not pushed into the voyage record — it is the voyage record, viewed through a different interface. There is no connector to break, no mapping to maintain, and nothing in transit that can fail silently.
The architecture, in full. See the platform overview →
Before you renew
Eight questions worth asking your current vendor.
These are not trick questions and we are not the only acceptable answer to them. But if you are approaching a renewal, they are the ones that surface what a system actually costs you.
If the answer involves a person reading it and typing, ask how long that typically takes and who does it when that person is on leave.
Latency between agreement and record is where disputes originate
For a chartering desk this is most of the working day. If the system has no record of a cargo until it fixes, everything before that is happening somewhere else.
Pre-fixture work is invisible to most voyage systems
Take any TCE in the system and ask what it was calculated from, which source supplied each input, and whether anyone overrode a value. If the answer is a spreadsheet somebody kept separately, the audit trail is fictional.
An estimate you cannot audit is one you cannot defend
If there is an integration between your email tool and your VMS, ask how a failed push is detected and by whom. Silent failure is the normal case, and it is discovered when a voyage turns out to be stale.
Integration failures are usually found by their consequences
Systems built for tankers, gas, chemicals and containers carry modules dry bulk desks never open. Ask what proportion of the licence covers functionality you do not touch.
Breadth you do not use is cost you do
If chartering, operations and finance are effectively three different applications, every hire learns three. Ask what onboarding actually takes, and what covering another desk requires.
Training cost is recurring and rarely counted
Ask to see the complete file for a claim you lost — the NOR, the SOFs, the correspondence, the CP terms. If assembling it means visiting several systems and somebody's mailbox, that is why it was lost.
Claims fail on evidence, not on arithmetic
Ask for a full export of your voyages, correspondence and documents in a machine-readable format. Ask what it costs and how long it takes. The answer tells you a great deal about the relationship.
Exit terms are the clearest signal of how a vendor sees you
Moving across
Ready to take your data from where it is now.
The platform accepts data from existing platforms through API endpoints. Voyages, counterparties and vessel records already held in a legacy system can be brought across rather than re-entered, and the scope of what moves is agreed with you before anything starts.
What we will not do is promise a timescale on a page. Every migration depends on what your current system will export and in what shape, and a number quoted before we have seen that is a number neither of us should rely on.
How a move actually runs
Start beside, not instead. The feed runs alongside your existing mailbox and your existing VMS. Nothing is switched off, and the desk can judge the parsing on its own traffic before anything is committed.
New voyages first. Voyages fixed from the start date run in the platform. Existing ones finish in the incumbent. No cutover weekend and no period where nobody is certain which system is authoritative.
History when it is useful. Past voyages carry benchmarking and counterparty history worth importing — but not worth delaying a start for.
Run both, briefly. A period of parallel running on the same voyages is the only honest way to compare, and it is the fortnight that actually decides the question.
Fairness
Where an incumbent is the better choice.
We would rather lose a deal early than lose it in month four of an implementation. Several situations genuinely favour staying where you are.
You trade more than dry bulk
If your book includes tankers, gas, chemicals or containers, we are the wrong system. The established platforms cover all of them, and running two systems to gain depth in one is a poor trade.
You need technical and crewing
MarineIT is commercial only. Planned maintenance, crewing, purchasing and dry docking are not ours, and the fleet-management vendors do them properly.
It is working and nobody complains
Switching a system of record has a real cost in disruption and attention. If your desk is not losing time to transcription and not losing claims to missing evidence, the case for moving is weak and we will say so.
Book a demo
Bring a voyage from your current system.
Ideally one that went wrong — a disputed laytime, a claim lost on evidence, an estimate that missed badly. We will run the same voyage here and you can see whether the difference is real or cosmetic.
We reply within one business day.