As you know, we’ve been rolling out Personnel 2.0, which will consist of four major improvements to Helm CONNECT Personnel: Work Rest, Crew Scheduling, Timesheets, and Sea Time. In this blog post, I’m excited to show you our new Crew Scheduling module.
What is the new Crew Scheduling module?
Our new Crew Scheduling module is a simple, visual way of quickly assigning crew to assets. Crew scheduling can be a complicated and time-consuming process, and our users told us they wanted a familiar, visual representation of their crew schedule that made it easy to do the following:
- Enter and update data
- Create consistent schedules
- Find crew to fill vacant positions
- Manage schedules by exception
- Integrate with other areas of Helm CONNECT, including Work Rest, Timesheets, Payroll, Jobs, Certifications, and Sea Time.
Of course, our current Crew Scheduling module already does many of these things, but we knew we could do even better!
The Design and Layout
Let’s start our tour with the design and layout of our new Crew Scheduling module. When you open it, it’s easy to focus on the information relevant to your schedule. The Schedule Filter immediately prompts you to filter the displayed data. For example, if you only needed to modify the schedule for a single asset, you would select that asset and load its schedule.
Fig 1. Crew Schedule Filter
Next, you’ll see the new Crew Schedule window with a calendar along the top and a crew schedule divided into the following elements:
- Asset row: The information on the schedule is divided clearly by asset.
- Crewing Requirement: This is where you’ll set up and schedule different crewing requirements based on the work the asset is doing.
- Crew Changes: This is where you’ll see any crew changes.
- Crew: Expand this to see the crew complement according to the groups you defined under Crewing Requirement.
The background color relates to the crewing requirement and highlights any positions you’ve configured to be required.
Fig 2. Crewing Requirements
Editing the schedule is easy. The simplest approach is to click and drag on the schedule to create some unassigned schedules.
Fig 3. Create Unassigned Schedules
But with a little bit of configuration and a consistent crew, you can also “paint ” groups of crew.
Fig 4. Paint Crew Groups
You can also configure assets running consistent rotations to load their crew schedules automatically.
Fig 5. Schedule Multiple Rotations at Once
And, of course, editing a schedule is easy. Just double-click a schedule and modify its details or resize the schedule bars with your mouse.
Fig 6. Easily Modify your Schedule
You can also download your schedule data directly to Microsoft Excel.
Fig 7. Download Your Schedule to Excel
Your crew schedulers can see individual schedules of individuals in a “By Crew” view of the schedule at the bottom of the page. This view displays the same data but makes it easy to see who’s working where. You can filter, sort, and group by several different options, such as department, position, days onboard, or days since being onboard, and we’ll continue adding more column options based on your feedback!
Fig 8. View Your Schedules by Crew
Don’t worry about retraining your crew; onboard integration is seamless and hooks directly into the existing crew change functionality in Helm CONNECT.
Fig 9. Integrate with Crew Changes Onboard
The basic workflow is simple:
- Crew schedulers create and finalize a schedule on shore and publish the crew changes to make them available onboard.
- Once the crew are crewed on and off onboard, the actual crew change times are sent back to shore.
- Crew schedulers see and compare the planned crew on and off times against the actual times.
How You Can Get Involved
We hope you’ve enjoyed this tour of some of the new crew scheduling improvements. Remember, the best way to find a solution that works for you is to help create one! Let your account manager know if you’re interested in any of the Personnel 2.0 improvements and want to get involved in the validation process. The companies we’re already working with say it’s exciting to see the results of their feedback in the validation demos after just a few weeks, and we’d love to have you join us!
Stay tuned for more blog posts in the coming weeks introducing other Personnel 2.0 improvements.
Until next time!
