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Do You Know VRS(Vessel Reporting System)?
Every day at noon, vessels at sea send their data via satellite to the office in their homeland. The data, which include the current location of a ship, its average speed, average fuel consumption, distance to destination, and estimated time of arrival at its destination, are sent out every day in the name of Noon Report.
Aside from noon report, there are various reports that are sent from a ship to its office.
Let’s take a look at a classification of those reports.
| Report Type | Specifics of reports |
| Departure Report | Managing information on vessel, cargo, SOSP, weather, bunker consumption, consumption for maneuvering, and bunker supply information on departure |
| Noon Report | Managing information on vessel, sailing, bilge, and weather at noon during a voyage and managing information on bunker consumption and steam during a voyage |
| Stoppage Report | Managing vessel info, reason, time, and ROB, in the occurrence of stoppage during a voyage |
| Arrival Report | Managing informaton on vessel, cargo, EOSP, and weather on arrival at the port and managing information on bunker consumption and maneuvering consumption until time of arrival |
| Daily Port Report | Managing information on a berthed vessel, port operation, weather and port bunker consumption |
| Shifting Report | In case a vessel moves in a port, managing vessel, port operation, shifting information, and bunker consumption that has occurred in shifting |
| Monthly ROB Report | Managing remaining bunker at each month end for each vessel |
| End of Voyage Report | Managing remaining bunker at the end of a voyage |
These various reports are regularly shared as files, and those shared files used to go through a cumbersome procedure in which they were filled out by an employee at the company before they were sent to the ship chartering system.
If VRS (Vessel Report System) is adopted, such procedures can be automated, thus promoting work efficiency. OPUS Bulk, a shipping operating system from CyberLogitec, provides VRS as such. Then, shall we take a look at the VRS of OPUS Bulk and see what effects can be had by adopting it?
1. VRS process from vessel to bulk operator
| Process | Process Specifics |
| ① | Ship mails Vessel Report via Inmarsat |
| ② | Customer’s mail server receives a report sent from the ship |
| ③ | Scheduling with parser engine the body text of report mail received by the mail server |
| ④ | Creating report data with parser engine scheduling |
| ⑤ | Checking and finalizing on OPUS Bulk > Operation Report screen |
2. Three expected effects of the adoption of VRS
1) Data accuracy improved through the reduction of input data
VRS basically works in validation check. When creating similar reports, items are arranged in consideration of priority of occurrence, and by providing for maximum exploitation of past reports, VRS reduces items that are entered by the user into the system. On top of the advantage of being accessible to anyone, VRS decreases human errors involved in manual inputting operation. Also, the technology, which converts report to data through a parser engine that registers improved data recognition rate, enhances the accuracy of VRS.
2) Cost of communications reduced through the decreased size of sent and received files
The satellite communications (Inmarsat), which is used in sending and receiving data between ships and on-land bases, provides lower speed compared to the Internet service used by private users, thus charging heftily and spending much time for transmitting files. When delivering data, VRS facilitates data delivery from ships by sending small-sized files in HTML.
3) Profitability improved through the creation and exploitation of real-time reports
As mentioned in the above table, VRS supports various types of reports including Noon Report, and reprocesses the data from received reports to provide a sailing report view including AB-Log, Daily Log, and Leg Performance. Thus created, real-time data are saved by created date and can be used for future purposes. Also, by supporting the creation of a future voyage plan through diagnosis of vessel condition and bunker status based on real-time data, it will help upgrade profitability of shipping companies.
Since VRS is very helpful in processing and taking advantage of data received from ships, it will greatly help enhance work efficiency for ship management companies. As the VRS provided by OPUS Bulk from CyberLogitec is easily linked with shipping operation and management system, we may often witness the successful creation of the system by existing users.
As VRS can apply categories unique to various-sized ship types, it can provide optimized services not only for large shipping companies, but also for small and mid sized ones.
