Streamlined Business Processes
Optimizing office reporting is saving time and money for seafood processors
Who are Seafood Processors?
Seafood processor tender vessels are the one-stop-shop for fishermen and their crews at sea. Whether a skipper needs to offload thousands of pounds of catch to empty their holds, fill up on fuel, or is desperately needing to stock up on coffee, a tender vessel is a fishing vessel’s “corner market” at-sea. For decades, tender vessels have kept parent company offices on land informed of these transactions through hand written invoices and delivery report tickets – common amongst fishers and industry partners. Deckhand Solutions was contracted to build a workflow application catered to tendermen and skippers alike, providing them with a newer, cleaner, and more modern approach to at-sea business data tracking.
Their Goal
This seafood processor aimed to use a bespoke workflow to deploy on Deckhand devices that captures business data from their tender vessels out at-sea. These vessels can then electronically generate cleaner reports for their corporate offices at home. Through the customization of this Deckhand workflow using Catchflow™, this seafood processing company can provide their workers with easy-to-use tools that help to solve complex corporate data collection and implementation inefficiencies. Seafood processors needed a data collection solution that spanned across a vast area of company needs – from collection, to aggregation, to review, and finally, processing.
Their Solution Story
- Utilizing the flexible Catchflow™ IDE, the Deckhand parent language, this seafood processor built an electronic invoicing system for tender vessels at sea.
- By using a Deckhand device in a ruggedized case on deck, tender operators are able to service vessels quickly over the rail, print out these invoices, and submit the data to corporate offices allowing office staff to improve their own processing systems.
- This new system allows for the increased capabilities and efficiency of office staff on land to batch, key, edit, and burst stacks of hundreds of invoices at a time.
How It Works
Before
After
Deckhand was designed to inherently support workers in harsh environments. With big buttons and automated data entry built into the software, ruggedized, waterproof hardware, and highly active customer support agents, it was clear that the user interface would support and benefit the tendermen on these vessels. In the background, the workflow running on these devices was built using Deckhand’s Catchflow™ IDE which allows for and supports easy software customization. The workflow that was built and designed for this seafood processing company allowed for a first iteration of digital transaction at sea. The digital invoices created could then easily be transferred to offices for easier, faster, and more efficient accounting practices.