Looking into chartering a vessel and just need some information to finalise your assessment?
Should be easy, right?
As a charterer, chances are you’ve been working with different versions and formats of the so-called chartering questionnaires for some time now.
Each time you send out a questionnaire, you have to find the correct document and make sure that you’ve got the right version, verify that the ship owner’s representative has received the questionnaire, give them due date and reminders in multiple emails and hope that they’ve started filling it out. When you finally get the questionnaire back you must verify that all required fields are properly filled out and last but not least import the requested information back into your system to assess the results.
When asking for information from your clients, you want to keep the process as simple and clear as possible. You want to get the most out of everyone's time without losing the quality of the collected information. In the end you want to think: “That was a good use of my time”.
The Ankeri process
Using Ankeri your time is guaranteed to be well spent. Here we give an overview of the Ankeri process and list the main features and benefits of using Ankeri for requesting ship related information from ship owners and their representatives.
No more spreadsheets or proprietary PDF forms in email
The basic entity in Ankeri is a ship profile. You can access available profiles directly from the start page or create new ones based on a ship’s IMO number. A new profile is always generated with the latest version of your questionnaire.
Before sharing a ship profile with a ship owner, it is recommended to have the profile automatically pre-filled out with information from the various data sources offered in Ankeri. That way you will make the life of the ship owner a lot easier and presumably get a faster response to you request, saving everyones time. Existing ship profiles are also likely to already have some information that can be shared with the owner for verification.
Once a ship profile has been pre-populated with information, it is time to share it with the ship owner with a request to be reviewed. The sharing can be set with an expiry and due date.
Single version of the truth, sourced from relevant places
The ship owner now receives an email notification about your review request, along with information about due date and a link to the ship profile. From there she can either start filling out the remaining fields or delegate the task to other people by sharing the ship profile. Information about who shared the ship profile with whom along with tracking of all field edits are kept for later reference.
Depending on the nature of the information being filled out, Ankeri provides different types of validations that substantially reduces the likelihood of typos and wrongfully entered information, saving time for everyone involved. Information provided can also include uploading of documents such as plans, certificates, etc.
While ship owner is in the process of adding information to your ship profile, you instantly get access to all the information being entered as well as the status of the review request. Once the ship owner has finished filling out the ship profile, she marks the process as done from the owner’s side and you get an email notification. Once you have reviewed the information received from the ship owner you can mark the process as completed from your side.
Make collected information work in your favour
Confirmed values are now clearly marked and available for future use. Besides being accessible in the Ankeri user interface, they can also be exported to various formats or accessed directly using the Ankeri API.
In case you already have a system to collect information from ship owners, you can use the Ankeri API to synchronise profile data with that system. Ankeri can also assist in making the information available in other ways, such as by creating a customised export ready to be imported directly into your system of choice. That way Ankeri can easily be implemented without intervening with processes already in use.
And this is just the beginning…
By using Ankeri, you will gradually build up a valuable master data for all the vessels being operated as well as those that you have chartered in the past. Having this information available in Ankeri unlocks other features and benefits such as high level performance monitoring and charter party management.
About Ankeri
Ankeri is an independent software company providing cloud-based software platform for ship owners and charterers to manage and share ship data to collaborate for improved performance.
More information at www.ankeri.net