90POE Crew case study - Zodiac Maritime
Learn how Zodiac Maritime scaled crew management with consistency, visibility, and confidence.
The challenge: scaling crew management at global complexity
Managing crew across a diverse fleet and global locations is one of the most operationally complex tasks in ship management. For an organisation of Zodiac Maritime’s scale, managing 6,500 seafarers, with over 20 different nationalities and 10 manning agents (both owned and 3rd party), the ambition was always to find platforms that could match the pace and precision the business required.
Crewing teams were working across multiple systems, supplementing digital tools with manual processes The result was increasing levels of administration and information silos. Coordinating between vessel and shore demanded a more connected approach, while compliance tracking requirements continued to intensify.
As the fleet expanded, the need for a single, integrated platform became impossible to ignore.
About Zodiac Maritime
Zodiac Maritime is one of the world’s leading ship owners, operating a large, diverse international fleet.
At a glance
Zodiac Fleet: ~200 vessels
Seafarers managed: ~6500
Headquarters: London, UK
Solution: OpenOcean STUDIO
Our Approach
OpenOcean STUDIO’s Crew module was implemented across Zodiac Maritime’s crewing operations and Manning agents, bringing the full crew management lifecycle into a single, integrated platform - designed to build on and enhance Zodiac’s existing processes and the expertise of their teams. Five distinct areas fell into scope:
Crew lifecycle management
From recruitment and onboarding through to retirement, crew records are managed in one place. Hire-to-retire visibility gives crewing managers a complete picture of each seafarer’s journey with the company.
Compliance
Automated expiry alerts and document tracking reduce the risk of a crew member sailing with an expired qualification. The system surfaces compliance gaps before they become operational or inspection issues. With the replacement of legacy systems, vessel, shoreside teams and crew now have shared, real-time visibility of the same data including via the Seafarer App.
Crew planning & deployment
Planning and deployment decisions are made with full visibility of crew availability, qualifications, and upcoming rotations. Reactive, last-minute crew changes are replaced by structured, forward-looking planning up to 2 years in advance.
Payroll
Payroll processing is integrated within the platform, reducing the risk of error from manual data transfer between systems and giving crewing finance teams a single source of truth. For Zodiac Maritime, the efficiency gain has been significant: payroll processing times have reduced from days to hours, freeing teams to focus on operational management.
Seafarer-vessel-shore communications - onBOARD & dedicated app
The onBOARD capability connects vessel, shore teams, and seafarers in real time. Captains now have full visibility of crew changes, document status and joiners and leavers. Crew changes can be completed and updated by the captain directly, in real time, rather than waiting for shore-side processing.
The dedicated mobile application gives seafarers direct access to their records, upcoming assignments, statements of earnings, and downloadable e-tickets for travel. For Zodiac, this connectivity was among the most significant outcomes of the implementation.
Impact
The impact of OpenOcean STUDIO Crew is measured across three areas:
administrative efficiency, compliance confidence, and operational planning quality.
100% Compliance
Visibility and tracking documentation compliance across locations and in seafarer’s app
~2 days to ~2 hrs
reduction in Captain payroll processing time
100% Increase
Increase in visibility and transparency to seafarer
“OOS gives us a platform with design options to apply full visibility on all aspects of crewing including planning, compliance and crew changes across crewing, manning agents, vessels and seafarers.
It is intuitive to use and has quickly been adopted by vessels and seafarers.
As we continue to evolve it is important to have a system that will evolve with us – and in some cases push us to evolve quicker.”
Marie Cooper - Director of Crewing - Zodiac Maritime
