Sinking cargo ship

Safer shipping milestone

MATE, our vessel inspection technology and marine fleet management platform, reached a significant milestone in 2020, with more than 2,000 surveys conducted.

MATE provides real-time data on the condition of vessels, identifying critical risk areas. The platform maps out fleet variances and the development of ship’s scores over time, which provides actionable insights to ship operators and allows them to take corrective actions or mitigate the risk of casualties.  Ship inspection scopes are always tailormade for each customer, allowing us to put extra focus on pre-defined KPIs.

Dennis de Bruin, Managing Director of Surveys, commented:

“We are very proud of the platform’s achievements and would like to thank everyone for the work they have done to make this possible. We have seen that mitigating risk in the marine industry has become more important than ever. Year after year, we see that incident numbers and marine insurance claims globally remain consistently high. Vessels have become bigger, and through the usage of more technology and more complex, incidents have increased exponentially. We feel a strong responsibility to use our proven expertise to strengthen maritime security and to help lessen the number of marine incidents happening.”

The increasing number of significant casualties that have burdened the container shipping industry over the last few years has triggered some operators, such as Maersk, Seaspan and CMA CGM, to start using MATE for increased safety and to reduce time loss incidents.

Tailormade scopes are set up to identify shortcomings in a large variety of risk categories, such as cargo collapses, maritime safety, personal injury, machinery breakdown and pollution prevention. For this, MATE draws on our century of experience in marine claims and accident investigation work. Being one of the leading maritime surveying companies, dealing with more than 1,600 damage investigations per year provides deep insight into how incidents happen and thus how to avoid them.

Another advantage of having MATE ready for service reveals itself when faced with limitations surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that various customers had problems getting internal ship inspections arranged, unable to get their in-house inspectors on board. Since MATE inspection programmes are rolled out in a global network of surveyors, serving over 500 locations worldwide, it proved relatively easy to organise local attendances for our customers.