Task Assistant® Products & Solutions are feature-rich and fit in with corporate practice. Ease of use, configurability and integrated reporting are characteristic of all the products.
No login and out of different systems. The interfaces, by design, seamlessly navigate crews and managers to the Technical Management, Procurement, Document Management, QHSE, and Crewing tasks they perform or supervise. This way, information is shared among different skill sets and across the enterprise departments. Asset Management and Compliance flow naturally as a by-product of people going about their work.
Usability with Task Assistant®. The Task Assistant demonstrably saves time for some of the most highly paid end users of software in any industry: Vessel Crews
Shipping Centred Design is not a luxury but a necessity. Especially since most ERP solutions are not designed for specific industries, and certainly not those with the peculiarities of the shipping industry, which are especially apparent when onboard:
- Business units moving around the world
- Highly paid end-users working without on-site IT support
- Windows of high stress, preoccupation and workload such as port-arrival
Technical Management
Task Assistant® Technical Management solutions are capable of keeping the maritime enterprise ahead of the competition. The Task Assistant® Technical Management Suite includes Planned Maintenance, Unplanned Maintenance and Asset Management. Together, these products form one cohesive system and demonstrate Ulysses System’s expert resolution of the industry’s technical use cases.
Task Assistant® Usability
The beauty of Task Assistant® usability is that Technical Management natively integrates with Procurement products (Task Assistant® for Purchasing, Inventory Management and Budget Management). And also with Task Assistant® Document Management and Crew Management solutions, Inspections and Certificates applications.
Planned Maintenance
Unplanned Maintenance
Asset Management
Procurement
The Task Assistant ® Procurement solutions offer cutting edge functionality giving Ulysses Systems clients a clear headway in their digital transformation. Specifically, the procurement suite includes Task Assistant® applications for Purchasing, Inventory Management and Budget Management. And Task Assistant ® Platform facilities make it an integrations hub capable of fully supporting current and future integration needs.
Furthermore, personalised task views for onboard and office staff, tailored to their responsibilities in the procurement cycle, offer noteworthy efficiency margins. As a result, the value for onboard officers and engineers but also for Purchasing, Marine Operations, Safety and Quality and Technical department managers is that they access critical procurement-related data, no matter what application they are using. Consequently, this enormously boosts decision-making and coordination.
Task Assistant® Usability
Procurement applications natively integrate with Technical Management (Task Assistant® for Asset Management, Planned Maintenance and Unplanned Maintenance). And also, with partner procurement portals Shipserv and Procureship.
Budget Management
Inventory Management
Purchasing
HSQE DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT
Task Assistant® HSQE Document Management supports all Ship Operations and HSQE processes.
Define hundreds of information capture and information distribution processes
You can define hundreds of information capture and information distribution processes suited to your needs and manage the changes according to your own design. So, you can design processes with smart forms without any limit to the scope of the information capture and distribution.
Ulysses Systems unique approach to Information Management
Ulysses Systems unique approach to Information Management means information finds you in whichever process you find yourself, ensuring you automatically have the information support you need. While also providing you access to the full list of enterprise manuals and forms.
Exceptionally efficient and user-friendly information management stems from unique enterprise profiling. To understand this, check out what Task Assistant® knows about your enterprise persona.
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Briefly, Task Assistant® knows your tasks in your business unit, i.e. the processes you perform in your location (which office, which vessel), and filters manuals and forms accordingly. And also knows your role, which answers the question ‘who’ (for example, HSQE Manager, Master, Chief Engineer etc.) and which allows workflow configurations that you can modify. Furthermore, the system knows your current task, which answers the question ‘what you are doing at the moment’ and also knows your task context which answers the question ‘in what circumstances?’.
Information support at the time of need
Information support at the time of need is the happy result of the enterprise profiling already described. Essentially, it means that information finds you without you searching for it. Effectively, Task Assistant® for HSQE Document Management brings together all the information your staff, on board and ashore, need in order to execute a task with due diligence. This includes manual sections and the dynamic information increments contained in forms that the different business units and departments exchange.
Task Assistant® Platform usability
Task Assistant® Platform usability ensures that Task Assistant® for HSQE Document Management natively integrates with Task Assistant® for Technical Management, Procurement, Inspections, Event Coordination Management, Certificates, Drydock, Crewing Management and the E-mail Integrator.
Security
All documents have the highest security and cannot be manipulated by unauthorized personnel no matter the permissions granted.
Deployment
The system is designed for quick deployment by easily using existing documents of the organization without the tedious task of converting them to something else.
Supported Technologies
MS Word (up to MSO365), MS Excel (up to MSO365), InfoPath (up to MSO2013), PDF and HTML4 and 5
All Products
System Facilities
Communications
Ship-Shore communications are the enabler of any Shipmanagement Software. And technological evolution obliges software providers to find ways to continuously improve their product in that regard
Task Assistant enables high usage and accurate data capture which creates large amounts of valuable data sent from vessel to the office
Compounded by the large number of vessels many of our customers manage, the Task Assistant is as tested as a ship management solution can be.
- With such a heavy number of concurrent users performing transactions over more than a decade, Ulysses has proved to be a reliable partner in providing our personnel with timely and reliable business information
The Task Assistant assists administrators in monitoring communications by:
Autocorrect – when a message has not been received, it will be re-sent
Configuration – administrators can choose the maximum size of each message,
as well as the frequency that messages transmit
Dashboard – a simple dashboard enables monitoring and alerting
Workbench
In the Workbench, users and administrators have at their disposal a truly uniquely and pliable tool enabled by a Graphical User Interface (GUI)
Entirely configurable user experience
TA Workbench offers an entirely configurable user experience. Consequently, users can configure Task Assistant products according to company structure and procedures. Configurability allows them to evolve the software without being bound by hard-coded vendor choices.
- By enabling an unrestricted combination of views, users, tasks and contexts, the Task Assistant helps your organization unlock its fullest potential
User-Defined Screens & Alerts
Users can decide the location of a column or a folder on their screen and save their own personal filters, shortcuts and alerts
Configurable Actions & Viewing rights
Administrators and department heads can decide who has access to which information down to the last data column
Stages in a workflow can be added or removed
Rights to view, edit or take action can be defined on a role/user basis
Alerts can be sent on a per role/user basis
Configurable Workflows
Workflows are entirely configurable to how the enterprise operates.
Users will view, edit or act at the precise workflow stage that concerns them.
Background information needed by users to take action will find them at the right workflow stage
Mobile Application rights
Role specific information and alerts directed to users’ mobile devices can be controlled and edited and rendered live at a moment’s notice
Integrations & Extensions
The Workbench integrations and extensions are sustainable and transparent by design, an important advantage for integrated systems that are upgrading. Technically, this means utilizing anything from API’s to microservices, or traditional methods such as file exchange.
Task Assistant products have at least one major, working integration with every shipmanager account
“Task Assistant and ShipServ integration allows shipmanagers to automate their procurement process end-to-end
This way our mutual clients can take advantage of both ShipServ’s and Ulysses’ open and innovative platforms
Integration between Task Assistant and ShipServ was first built in 2015 and has worked seamlessly since then”
A Developers’ Guide and a full and unrestricted Data Dictionary enables in-house developments and plug-ins that do not affect the Task Assistant version upgrade.
Comprehensive audit trail
The Task Assistant enables a complete audit trail on all users and all objects of Task Assistant products and allows system administrators to configure what needs to be tracked.
Task Assistant Workbench Audit Trail allows:
Comprehensive usage reporting and statistics
Who? And when? Which action was it? At which workflow stage?
Auto-Compliance with traceability and transparency, requirements like those set out by SoX (Sarbanes-Oxley Act)
Upgrades
Because flexibility is synonymous with Ulysses Systems software, Task Assistant product upgrades offer ship managers signifcant options without constraints.
- Ulysses publishes regular Task Asssistant upgrades which are available to all users upon release
- TA upgrades are interoperable which allow vessels to operate on different versions
- This eliminates the risks of upgrade execution, ensuring a smooth transition from one version to another
- All shipmanagers that have used the TA have successfully upgraded multiple version
- Hotfixes are installed automatically on all workstations and on every version
- Execution was even trickier considering that three vessels had planned vetting inspections at the time of the upgrade, but in the end disruption and downtime were both minimal
The vessels that had planned audits continued to use the previous version until the inspections were concluded and were then subsequently upgraded.
Users went home on Friday closing having worked on the previous version and on Monday at opening went straight to using the latest version
http://www.exmar.be/en
Exmar Upgrades all 45 vessels to latest Task Assistant version – Ulysses Systems (ulysses-systems.com)
Task Orientation
Task Orientation is unique to Ulysses systems Task Assistant applications. And ensures that the software configures around maritime enterprise roles. By matching the way people work, the application guarantees an intuitive reporting experience that is highly time and cost effective.
As a result, this unique Task Assistant business modelling principle significantly slashes the most significant cost of ERP implementation among future users: Crew Training & Familiarization
- On the first 30 vessels, Task Assistant was successfully deployed with no training whatsoever. Crew usage rates hit 100% within 4 months
The crew-centric design of the Task Assistant on-board modules is user friendly and successfully addresses the problem of poor usability; errors are avoided, users are guided and uasbility encourages whole-scale usage
Partnerships
