Offshore boarding scheduling: what the system must control

It is six in the evening at a shore support base. Tomorrow's seven o'clock crew boat already has more names than seats, two companies asked for space by phone and nobody wrote it down, and a confirmed technician has expired training. The logistics lead spends the night on the phone fixing what a clean register would have caught earlier.

This article explains what an offshore boarding scheduling system must control, why a shared spreadsheet stops working when volume grows, and how to roll the system out in stages. In the middle is a 16-item checklist to specify or assess yours. If you are still deciding between off-the-shelf software and a system built for your process, start with our article on custom software vs. off-the-shelf.

What is offshore boarding scheduling?

Offshore boarding scheduling is the process of reserving seats for people and space for cargo on the support trips between the shore base and units at sea, such as platforms, rigs and ships. The company that needs to send someone, the logistics team that builds the trips, the operator of the destination unit and the quay team all take part.

The trip may be by crew boat, support vessel or helicopter. This article focuses on marine transport, where the same vessel often carries passengers from several companies and cargo of different sizes on one sailing.

Scheduling connects to safety at the destination unit. Brazil's NR-37, the Ministry of Labour and Employment standard on health and safety on oil platforms, requires the operator to give general safety instructions at each boarding, recorded on an attendance list, when the person arrives on board. To meet that, the unit needs to know in advance who is coming. The official text is in Portuguese.

Why does a shared spreadsheet stop working?

A shared spreadsheet works while few companies book and one person checks everything. When dozens of companies write in the same file, each adding a row at the bottom, control depends on whoever reviews it paying attention.

When volume grows, the most common problems for teams that still schedule by phone, message or spreadsheet are these:

• Anyone with the link can delete or change another company's row.
• There is no automatic seat limit, so overcrowding only shows up at the quay.
• Documents and training are checked by hand, when they are checked at all.
• Cancellations do not free the seat for someone waiting.
• There is no record of who no-showed, or how often.
• At month end, billing per company comes from a manual count.

Personal data is another issue. An open spreadsheet often shows the name, ID and phone of hundreds of people to every company. Brazil's LGPD (Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados Pessoais), the law that regulates personal data processing, asks for security measures to protect that data from unauthorised access. A system with a login per company solves a large part of this in the design itself.

What must the system control?

The system must control three linked things: the trip, the people and the cargo. Each has its own rules, and the value is in checking all of them before confirmation.

What usually stays out of the first scope is optimised routing across several units, real-time integration with the vessel schedule and GPS tracking. Those functions are useful and can come later, once the basics run and the team trusts the record.

Checklist: what must the scheduling system cover?

The checklist below gathers what tends to make a difference on the quay day to day, in 16 concrete checks. Use it to write the scope of a new system and to assess what you already use, whether spreadsheet or software.

With a vendor, ask for a demo on a real trip from your operation: a full crew boat, a passenger with expired training and a last-minute cancellation. If the system handles those three cases in front of you, the rest tends to be tuning. For internal use, tick what already exists and start improvement with capacity and documents, which cause the most trouble at the quay.

How do you roll out boarding scheduling?

Rollout works better in stages, starting with one route and a few companies, with the spreadsheet still available for a short period.

1. Map the current process. List who requests, who approves, which fields the spreadsheet has and which rules live only in the coordinator's head.
2. Set the rules with logistics and HSE/QSMS. Notice period, documents required per unit, limits for each vessel and the no-show policy.
3. Register vessels, units and companies. That register is the base of everything and must be right before you open it to users.
4. Start with one route. Invite the companies that board most on that route and stay close for the first weeks.
5. Move check-in to the quay. The quay team confirms boarding and no-shows on a phone, and that record feeds the indicators.
6. Expand and retire the spreadsheet. Route by route, until the spreadsheet is only a historical file.

The system needs to work well on a phone, because the request leaves the company office but confirmation happens at the quay, often with a weak signal. In the marine passenger transport case we published, scheduling moved off the phone and messaging into a system where client companies book passengers and cargo, operations create the trips and the pilot records departure and arrival on a phone.

What if an internal system or an ERP already exists?

When the company already has a scheduling system or an ERP, the usual path is to integrate rather than replace. The new system can cover what is missing, such as the requesting companies' portal or quay check-in, and exchange data with what already exists by API or file.

Before you decide, three questions help. Does the current system have a reliable API or export? Who maintains that system and how long does a change take? Is the problem in the register, the workflow or only the screen? If the old system blocks the operation, see how we approach support and modernization of existing systems.

Contractors and small companies that board little also belong in the picture. For them, the portal needs to be simple enough that training is unnecessary: sign in, pick the date, say who is going and follow the confirmation.

When is a scheduling system not enough?

A scheduling system organises the queue and checks the rules, but it does not decide on its own the priority between two crews that need to board on the same day. That decision stays with logistics and with the unit's operation. The system makes the decision visible and recorded.

It also does not replace the operator's safety procedures or the arrival briefing required by NR-37. What it does is make sure the list of who will board is right before departure, with valid documents. Documentation requirements for each unit are set by the operator and by the company's HSE/QSMS lead.

If scheduling is the first step of something larger, such as quay access control, permit to work or vessel inspection, design the people and company register with those modules in mind. That is what we did on the port operations platform, where several processes share the same register. As a custom software company, we build this kind of system as custom web systems. If you want to look at your case, the initial diagnostic conversation has no charge.