mana.ir

According to MANA, The Maritime Reporting Model, a digital initiative developed with a number of partners, including the port of Rotterdam— led by the Danish Maritime Authority — aims to reduce the level of paperwork required during port clearance, a common bugbear throughout the shipping industry.

“Reducing the administrative burden of port call is a major problem,” Aron Frank Sørensen, BIMCO’S head of maritime technology and regulation, told Lloyd’s List. “The ship’s master should not be bogged down in paperwork, but rather focused on the operation and safety of the ship.” 

The vision for MRM is to standardise communication between ship and shore, using a global standard for tagging information, such as the ship’s name or the number of crew on board. 

Essentially, MRM is “a harmonisation of data models used by maritime stakeholders”, according to BIMCO.

The Copenhagen-based association tested the technology on a trial voyage last month from the Polish port of Gdansk to to Rotterdam via Aarhus, Denmark, and Bremerhaven, Germany.

During the journey, BIMCO calculated that the average time to manually complete all 32 of the reports required during each port call was between 16 and 64 minutes. However, MRM offers the potential to reduce the time of these individual processes as a whole by as much as 80%.

Having piloted the scheme in Europe, the next phase will be to implement the system globally.

Before rolling it out commercially, however, BIMCO is looking for approval from the International Maritime Organization, which is already working on the harmonisation of data.

MRM will be put before the IMO’s Facilitation Committee in June, but has already received the backing of a number of IMO member states, including Liberia, Turkey and the Marshall Islands.

“We want the IMO to manage a kind of phone book, where we have tagged the information and data in a central IMO database that everybody can use for digital communication,” said Mr Sørensen.