The 4th Shipdex Conference took place at the MAN Diesel PrimeServ Academy in Augsburg, Germany on Feb. 16, where the Shipdex protocol was declared ready and available for use. Shipdex (Ship Data Exchange) is international business rules (protocol) -based and fully compliant with S1000D, developed to standardize the exchange of electronic technical data within the shipping community. The Shipdex protocol aims to ensure a high quality of technical and logistical data and simplify the exchange of data within the industry. For application service providers, Shipdex is a basic specification for implementing data interfaces from technical manual solutions to maintenance and purchase or any fully fledged ERP systems.
The purpose of the Augsburg event was to bring together the different sub-groups of the European maritime industry and show the milestones reached during the development of a solution to the long-standing industry challenge regarding paper manuals, namely the on-board availability of correct maintenance data. On the day, there were over 100 attendees, including owners, classification societies, shipyards, equipment makers and software providers of maintenance systems.
Speakers included Shipdex founding members Grimaldi Group, Intership Navigation, MacGregor (as part of the Cargotec Group), Alfa Laval, SpecTec and MAN Diesel, as well as Rolls Royce Marine, Gemanischer Lloyd, United Arab Shipping Company, Corena and the S1000D Council.
Promising, concrete signs of the new protocol’s acceptance were also revealed in a series of announcements that:
• MAN Diesel is ready to deliver manuals in Shipdex format
• MacGregor Cranes will shortly be ready to deliver manuals in Shipdex format and MacGregor RoRo and MacGregor Hatch Cover will follow
• SpecTec is offering their Shipdex-compliant CMMS, the AMOS Business Suite
• Shipowners are ordering Shipdex data for their new building projects
• United Arab Shipping Company has announced that it has requested Shipdex datasets for nine coming newbuildings
• Germanischer Lloyd is exploring the possibilities of using Shipdex in its customer communication and approval processes
• Rolls-Royce Marine has become a registered member of the Shipdex community
All presentations are available from the Downloads-Documents section at: www.shipdex.com