MER Solutions is a multi-disciplinary professional practice offering specialist shipping and maritime industry solutions encompassing maritime, technical, verification, innovation and consulting services.
They are leaders in performing inspections of bulk carrier maritime vessels both in Australia and around the world, utilising their Bulk Vessel Inspection Questionnaire (BVIQ) app. This is a standardised tool for assessing, reporting on and improving the physical condition, operation and safety performance of bulk carriers.
In July 2022, MER Solutions realised that the data they were gathering, and the quality of its service would allow them to fast-track into another offering, vetting vessels – and thus, the concept of MER Vet was formed.
With an industry conference planned for early October, MER solutions set an ambitious timeframe to develop a working demo to present at the conference.
MER Solutions worked with Kiandra to create MER Vet, a web-based application that will be used internally by MER Solutions staff to provide a positive and transparent process of verifying vessels' physical condition, operation, and safety performance. This will help to assist its clients in identifying non-compliant vessels and eliminating any potential risks.
During the Proof of Concept (PoC) stage there were a lot of tasks to be done to deliver a working demo for the October conference. MER Solutions Technical Platform Lead, Iain White said the Kiandra team were very patient and flexible as MER re-prioritised tasks to make the demo date.
“I am a seasoned Agile Project Manager/Scrum Master and I know I asked Kiandra a lot of things that would not align with their normal working practices, and without their flexibility, we would not have been able to have the demo ready in time,” Iain said.
Having an actual demonstratable product has allowed MER to get early buy-in from some major port authorities before they could fully launch a full product early the following year.
MER Vet is a major pivot for MER Solutions along with its sister suite of applications MER Ship.
The addition of this application will help to simplify and streamline the recording and verification of data that has a direct impact on safety onboard vessels.
MER Solutions soft-launched MER Vet in late December and with the interest generated during the industry demo, expect to perform a full rollout early next year.
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