How Cymare Cut PSC Deficiencies by 40% - and Achieved Zero Migration Downtime

The company

Cymare operates a fleet of 9 oil tankers across the Baltic and North Sea. With vessels spending extended periods in remote waters - often without reliable satellite connectivity - the technical superintendent team struggled to maintain real-time visibility into maintenance status, certificate expiry, and procurement from shore.

The problem

Before Rite PMS, Cymare's maintenance workflow relied on a combination of paper logbooks onboard and a shore-side spreadsheet updated manually during port calls. The process looked like this:

• Chief engineers printed maintenance schedules from a shared Excel file before departure
• Jobs were logged on paper onboard throughout the voyage
• On arrival in port, data was transcribed manually into the shore spreadsheet - a process taking 2–3 days per vessel per month
• Certificate expiry tracking was managed via a separate calendar system, with reminders occasionally missed during busy port turnarounds
• PSC inspections revealed recurring non-conformities related to overdue maintenance that had been completed onboard but not yet recorded in shore-side systems

"We were getting deficiencies on inspections for jobs we had actually done," said the Technical Superintendent. "The issue wasn't the crew - it was the gap between what was done onboard and what the shore team could see."

Why Rite PMS

Cymare evaluated three PMS solutions before selecting Rite PMS. The deciding factor was offline capability: competing tools required active internet connectivity to log jobs, which made them impractical for vessels operating in areas with poor satellite coverage.

"Every other system we looked at was cloud-first. Rite PMS was the only one where offline operation was the design assumption, not an afterthought. The sync just works - our engineers don't need to think about it"

The unlimited-users model was also a practical consideration: Cymare needed shore team access for multiple superintendents, the procurement team, and vessel managers - without paying per seat.

The rollout

Rite Software's onboarding team ran a phased deployment over 6 weeks, starting with two pilot vessels before rolling out to the full fleet. All 9 vessels were live within 8 weeks of contract signing, with no operational downtime during migration.

Crew training was completed onboard during normal operations - the interface was described by the chief engineers as "intuitive enough to use without a manual".

The results

Within six months of full deployment, Cymare saw a 40% reduction in PSC deficiencies related to maintenance records - from an average of 2.4 per inspection to 1.4. The manual data entry process that had previously consumed 2–3 days per month per vessel was eliminated entirely.

Certificate expiry alerts, now automated and centrally visible to shore management, eliminated a category of deficiency that had recurred on three consecutive PSC inspections.

"The system paid for itself within the first quarter. Not because it's cheap - because the cost of deficiencies, manual admin, and missed certificates was higher than we had ever properly accounted for."