Shore's picture of the fleet is usually a reconstruction.

The problem is plumbing, not reporting

A superintendent with eight vessels is running eight of these reconstructions at once, and none of them agree with each other about when they were last true. The honest answer to “what is the state of the fleet” is usually “as of the last time each ship told me something, which was a different day for each ship.”

That is not a failure of diligence. The data exists on every vessel, it is accurate, and the people holding it are not withholding it — there is just no route from a deck in the Malacca Strait to a desk in Piraeus that does not involve somebody retyping something. Every retyping is a delay, and every delay is a decision made on a picture that has already moved.

What Navvex changes

Every vessel keeps her own complete record, aboard, whether or not she has a link. When a link exists the record moves by itself. What shore reads is not a summary somebody compiled from messages — it is built directly out of the records the ships wrote, and it moves when they move.

That makes one fact first-class, and it is the fact most fleet software hides: when each vessel was last heard from. A ship that has been dark for nine days is not a ship with no problems. Showing her as green would be a lie of omission, so she is shown as what she is — not known, nine days old.

A fleet view that cannot be wrong about its own age is worth more than one that is prettier and silently stale.

What it is for

Three questions, asked constantly by people who do not have time to chase eight masters for answers: which vessels are ready to be inspected, which are not and why, and what needs a decision from shore this week. The fleet view exists to answer those and nothing else. It is ordered by what is asking for something rather than alphabetically, because an alphabetical fleet list is a filing cabinet.