Confidential — Private Shipping Group, Netherlands
Ship & Fleet Management Platform for a Dutch Shipping Group
- Netherlands
- Region
- Group fleet
- Vessels supported
- Laravel · Vue · MySQL
- Tech
- Live in operation
- Status
Project details
The Challenge
The client is a privately held Dutch shipping group operating a fleet of vessels under a single shore-side operations team. As the group grew, the operational reality of running multiple ships — voyage planning, crew rostering, maintenance and repair cycles, fuel and consumption tracking, document compliance, and the steady drumbeat of reporting back to shore — was being held together by spreadsheets, email threads, and a handful of disconnected legacy tools that didn't share a data model.
The brief was to build a single ship and fleet management platform that the shore-side operations team and the on-vessel crews would both actually use day to day. The client requested confidentiality on their identity given the commercial sensitivity of fleet operations data, and the platform had to be reliable enough that voyage and compliance decisions could be made directly from it rather than from a parallel paper trail.
Our Approach
We designed and built the platform around a single, canonical model of the vessel as the unit of operation. Every workflow — a voyage plan, a crew rotation, a maintenance job, a fuel log, a certificate expiry — hangs off a specific vessel record, with the shore-side ops team and the on-vessel users reading from and writing into the same authoritative store rather than maintaining parallel records that have to be reconciled later.
The platform covers the operational surface the group actually runs on. Voyage planning is modelled as a structured workflow rather than a free-form document, with port calls, ETAs, cargo manifests, and route notes captured in fields that downstream reporting can pull from cleanly. Crew rostering ties into vessel-specific staffing requirements and certification expiries, so a rotation that would put the vessel out of compliance is flagged before it's confirmed rather than caught at the gangway.
- Fleet operations — vessel records, current status, position context, and the day-to-day operational dashboard for the shore-side team.
- Voyage planning — structured voyage records with port calls, schedules, cargo context, and handover notes for the next leg.
- Crew rostering — rotation planning with certification awareness, leave tracking, and conflict detection at the planning stage.
- Maintenance & repair workflows — scheduled maintenance, ad-hoc job tickets, parts and supplier context, and a service history that travels with the vessel.
- Fuel & consumption logs — voyage-level and daily consumption capture, with reporting that supports both operational tuning and commercial reconciliation.
- Document compliance — vessel certificates, inspection records, port documents, and expiry surfacing so nothing lapses unnoticed.
- Shore-side reporting — consolidated reporting back to operations leadership, with the same data the on-vessel users are entering.
The compliance surface was treated as load-bearing. A missing or expired certificate can hold a vessel in port, and the cost of that is not theoretical — the platform surfaces upcoming expiries early, tracks the renewal workflow, and keeps an auditable history of what was valid when. The maintenance side carries the same discipline: every job ticket leaves a trail that the next inspector or surveyor can follow without the operations team having to assemble it after the fact.
Stack: Laravel · Vue · MySQL, deployed on infrastructure that respects the reality that on-vessel connectivity is intermittent and that the shore-side team needs the data to be there when the link is back up.
The Outcome
The platform is live and in operation across the group's fleet. The shore-side operations team runs voyage planning, crew rostering, maintenance scheduling, and compliance tracking from a single surface, and the on-vessel users feed the same record system rather than maintaining parallel logs that would have to be reconciled later. The reporting layer gives leadership consolidated visibility across the fleet without anyone chasing individual vessels for end-of-month files.
The engagement continues as the group extends the platform with additional operational workflows and refinements driven by lived experience on the system. The architectural decision to make the vessel the canonical unit, and to keep shore-side and on-vessel users on the same authoritative store, has held up as the platform has absorbed real operational load.
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