08 Jul 2020
Peter Rowand
Marketing and Business Development

Maintenance manager working on vessel

With COVID-19 restrictions slowly being lifted, the good news is that many vessels are returning to work. Unfortunately, this also means that many of you are now faced with by a long list of overdue checklists and forms that built up during the downtime. So how do you save time and stay compliant while you sort through this backlog? We suggest you take advantage of the improved omit feature in Helm CONNECT! Introduced in Version 1.19it allows you to quickly omit up to 100 unfinished overdue checklist or form items at a time and still have a record of each omission in history. Cue the happy maintenance and compliance managers!

In earlier versions of Helm CONNECT, if you finished or omitted an item and selected a period that wasn’t the oldest, any previous uncompleted copies were simply deleted from the system and you couldn’t track them or report on them. Now, instead of being deleted, all those previous uncompleted copies will be omitted and a record of each one will be recorded safely in history.

So how does the improved omit feature work? If you click Omit or Finish Now on a checklist or form and select a period that isn’t the oldest, you’ll now see a warning that you must omit the earlier overdue items first. Then, when you click Next, you’ll see a new window with a list of the items you’re about to omit.

Note: This window can only display up to 100 overdue items at a time. If you have more than 100 overdue items, you’ll have to repeat this procedure again.

In the new window, before you can click Omit or Finish Now, you’ll need to do two things:

  • Enter a reason for each omission.  You can either use the default text, or you could enter something more specific, such as “Not completed due to downtime during COVID-19”. This reason will display in history for each overdue item that you omit.
  • Confirm that you want to omit these overdue items by selecting the checkbox below the “Reason for omission” field.

 

How to use the bulk omit feature to save time and stay compliant

Not only will the improved omit feature save you time while catching up on any work missed because of COVID-19, it will also ensure that you have sound historical records for your audits.

If you’d like to learn more about this and the many other great features we added to Helm CONNECT in Version 1.19, check out our latest release blog or release notes.

Until next time!