NSF FARE Planner

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The Marine Facilities Planning platform is a joint NIOZ, NERC and Maas Software Engineering project that could be made available to other organisations.

If you are interested in what this platform can do for your organisation, send us a message.
  • Inventory Management
    The IMS is designed to provide a comprehensive equipment management and tracking system, scalable for large and small programs or organisations. The system is able to be used as a stand-alone equipment management and tracking system or as part of the overall integrated MFP. The system is able to record the current and historic location of equipment in compliance with customs requirements; it manages the movement of equipment worldwide, and tracks equipment in support of the organisations delivery programme.
  • Maintenance & Certification
    In the inventory management system maintenance and certification events can be planned in the equipment calendar. During registered periods of maintenance the equipment cannot be requested or moved to cruises or transports.
  • Customs Warehouse
    The IMS is designed to be compliant with ‘Customs Warehouse’ requirements, and has a separate location in the IMS database where T1 goods are located when not on board a ship or deployed at sea. The Customs Warehouse is the base location of all T1 goods and corresponds with a secure location on land where these goods can be inspected by customs authorities.
  • Barcode Scanners
    can be used to move equipment. Barcode Scanners are useful when packing equipment before a cruise or at sea at the end of the cruise. When wifi is available all movements registered with the scanners will automatically be transferred to the database.
  • Transport
    are movements of equipment to and from ships or external locations. Equipment can be planned on transports or ships using planlists. Once the equipment on the planlists has actually been loaded on the transport or ship, a customs report can be generated.
  • Science Portal
    The Scientist Portal is designed for scientists to complete online applications to access ships and equipment to support their science projects. The Scientist Portal is where their applications and equipment can be managed from application stage through to delivery. Once a scientist has created an application within the Portal a ‘workflow’ will be generated to support the project management of the application through its delivery cycle. The workflow identifies a series of steps and responsibilities that will guide the scientist through the process from application stage, through to delivery and post-cruise reporting.
  • Project Management
    The Project Management module is integrated across the MFP system, so when a scientist creates a new application on the Scientist Portal for access to ship time or equipment, the application (with its unique identifier) will be visible in the Project Management module, showing its current planning stage and status. The Project Management module creates a ‘workflow’ for each application to ensure all planning and delivery requirements are managed and recorded. When a particular step in the workflow is completed, the status of the application is updated moving the application onto the next step. When the application is added to the cruise program ‘milestones’ and ‘due dates’ for specific steps in the workflow will be generated automatically with automatics email alerts sent to key stakeholders in the project.
  • Voyage Planning Tool
    The VPT is where cruise programs can be created. It is possible to create multiple draft programs for multiple programme scenarios until the final programme is agreed and published. A voyage can be created by adding the ports to be visited during the voyage, with cruise applications added to this voyage using ‘drag and drop’. The voyage planner provides a flexible interface to create science programmes across one or many ships using the integrated modules within the system.
  • Mooring Configurator
    The Mooring Configurator module is a tool to support the design and construction of instrument moorings. Segments such as cables, current meters, weights etc. and their specifications can be added via segment configuration. A new mooring can be compiled from available segments. The mooring configurator will calculate the lift of the total mooring.
  • Personnel Planning Tool
    The Personnel Planning tool is an integrated scheduling tool designed to allocate staff to specific cruise programme activities. The planning tool allows organisations to set up groups of technicians and ship’s crew to be allocated to particular cruises within a programme. The personnel planning tool has a range of functions to manage allocated sea days against contracted sea days, and a range of reporting tools to support personnel resource management according to the particular organisations requirements.