NS 5 Design Characteristics
ABS Nautical Systems has a 20-year history of providing marine operations software solutions, and we are today the leading provider of such systems to the community of major U.S. maritime operators, and the 2nd largest provider globally. NS 5 is our new flagship product, replacing the existing SafeNet product line, and represents the joining of those years of marine industry experience with the latest in software technology.
Key Design Characteristics Of The NS 5 Software Suite Include:
- INTEGRATION
The NS 5 system has been designed from the start as an integrated system wherein the same data may be referenced for numerous different functions. To give just one example, the same equipment hierarchy that is established for the Purchasing function also serves as the backbone of maintenance and repair activities. Functional modules incorporated in NS 5 include Purchasing & Inventory Control, Maintenance & Repair, Code Compliance, Voyage Management, and Crew Management & Payroll.
- SINGLE POINT OF DATA ENTRY
Data is entered just once, at the location where it first becomes available. So, for example, a new account code or vendor would be entered just once in the office and propagated automatically to all vessel systems, while information about repairs carried out onboard would be entered in the vessel and replicated shoreside.
- SYSTEM ACCESSIBILITY AND REPLICATION
Ability to replicate information to and from the vessels on a reliable and cost-effective basis is a key requirement in the marine environment. The impact of this requirement is often overlooked, as the replication capabilities advertised by land-based systems are typically based on those provided by the database vendors, which assume the continuous availability of large amounts of inexpensive bandwidth – conditions which simply do not exist in the marine environment. ABS Nautical Systems is the industry leader in this area – our proprietary Replication Manager technology, optimized for our applications’ needs, has replicated tens of millions of transactions since the 1980’s with high reliability and at low cost.
- CUSTOMIZABLE , ROLE -BASED ACCESS PERMISSIONS
Over 100 discrete access permissions can be granted or withheld as applicable from each authorization profile or “role”, allowing access control to be fine-tuned.
- CENTRALIZED ADMINISTRATION
User ID’s, access controls, vendor lists, and other similar information are centrally maintained in a single location and automatically replicated to all sites via Replication Manager.
- SHARED INFORMATION
Replication Manager makes the information accessible everywhere it needs to be. The system administrator can determine which vessels’ information is replicated to which sites. Similar machinery items installed in various vessels are identified as such for analytical purposes.
- CONSISTENT SYSTEM HIERARCHY
NS 5 provides a visual, tree-control-based explosion of the vessel / machinery / parts hierarchy. In order to improve ease of use, this structure has been designed not to require the use of code numbers, although support for coding systems is provided.
- EASE OF USE
Our 20 years of marine operations software development and implementation experience, along with the detailed customer feedback we’ve received along the way, has enabled us to optimize our system design to maximize ease of use and end-user acceptance. We strive to minimize data entry and keystrokes wherever possible, and rely heavily on pull-down menus with toolbar icons. Our applications use the marine industry terminology that is familiar to the end-users throughout.
- STANDARD ARCHITECTURE
NS 5 is written in the Java programming language, which is arguably the leading programming language of the Internet. As one of the most popular software technologies in existence today, Java has attracted a vast aftermarket of software design tools, utilities and add-ins, which we are able to benefit from; typically, these allow us to provide more flexible and powerful capabilities to the end-user, or to facilitate interfacing with other software programs. Although our standards-based approach to database design and integration means that NS 5 can potentially support a variety of DBMS’s, our primary database platform is MySQL (www.mysql.com), a lightweight but robust and extremely powerful DBMS which is rapidly making inroads into the database market and which is now being bundled by major manufacturers such as Hewlett-Packard. With respect to operating systems supported, NS 5 is centered firmly in the Microsoft Windows world, which is a de facto standard in the marine industry.
- INTEGRATION WITH EXTERNAL SYSTEMS
We have long experience in this area, having carried out our initial integrations with third-party systems in the 1980’s. Most of our major client implementations feature at least one such interface with an external system. Over the years, we have found that many such interfaces fall into predictable patterns, which has permitted us to design facilities to standardize large portions of the needed interface functionality, with additional custom logic being added as dictated by the particular client’s requirements. This approach results in for faster implementation time, lower cost and higher reliability because less custom software has to be developed.