Martin Crawford-Brunt explains RightShip’s new safety score

Over the past two years, the RightShip team has been working to enhance our digital products and as part of that transformation, we are moving from a Risk Rating to a Safety Score, which will provide several benefits to our customers and continue to help us achieve our goal of industry best practice. The Safety Score will go live in September 2020.

Six sub scores, 20 safety considerations

The RightShip Safety Score is a new way to benchmark safety. It incorporates various maritime data sets into one easy to understand score, based on 20 safety considerations and six sub scores. The aim of the Safety Score is to focus on the performance of a vessel, its DOC holder, class and flag. We made this change because we consistently heard requests to make the Safety Score methodology fairer and more transparent.

By focusing on a vessel’s operational history over the last five years, the Safety Score puts the operator in control of their results and offers a clear path to improvement where required, while also highlighting vessels with outstanding practices. The output is a score out of five, where a five out of five result indicates best practice attention to safety.

All RightShip members can see a vessel’s full safety history as well as the effects of each of the sub-scores on the overall Safety Score. You can also benchmark each vessel against its peers for the full view on global maritime safety.

Putting the ship operator in control

We previously used a predictive model to indicate risk. Now, the new Safety Score provides a clear performance score card. This model makes greater use of industry insights, data and the experience that RightShip is renowned for.

As a result, we have removed size, age, type and builder from the Safety Score to create a model that is centred on clear safety performance indicators. Operators can see how their score has been calculated in more detail, in turn making improvements in key operational areas where required. In turn, we are levelling the playing field for assessing the safety standards for all vessels, regardless of type.

This allows for high performance vessels which have been well maintained to achieve good result, even if other vessels of its type have performed poorly. Similarly, an older vessel, which has been well maintained and managed with few recent safety events isn’t penalised because it is an older vessel.

Supporting a path to excellence

The new Safety Score is not only fairer and more transparent, the benchmarking is improved: you can see the full break down of every vessel’s Safety Score. This helps you understand where that particular vessel is placed in its peer group, through our refined database of safety events.

The safety score is an indicator designed to be used as one of many factors in the due diligence process and complements our vetting services. Coupled with maritime expertise it allows for the assessment of a nominated vessel and the provision of a vetting recommendation for a Charterer. This means members of the shipping industry are able to undertake a complete risk assessment of vessel or voyage.

Moreover, we want to support ship owners, offering a clearer path to improvement: by only including inputs which are in control of the shipowner, the Safety Score encourages owners to invest in improved processes and technologies that make the entire supply chain safer.

Moving from stars to a progress bar

In this new model, we are moving from stars to a progress bar, to provide a clearer indication of how safe a vessel is and where there is room for improvement. This system provides a more transparent view of how safe and sustainable a vessel is when compared to others in a fleet.

We believe there is always room for improvement and the progress bar highlights the positive progress a ship owner is making, while also providing a more accurate view of the potential for additional enhancements.

For more information and to sign up for our educational webinars, visit: comingsoon.rightship.com