From spreadsheets to a platform: digitizing maritime audits
Not every project starts with AI. Some start with a spreadsheet that's quietly running an entire business — and the right first move is to replace the workflow, cleanly, before anything intelligent gets layered on top.
This is one of those. A maritime audit consultancy came to us running every vessel inspection through email threads, file-transfer links, and a shared spreadsheet. It worked, until it didn't scale.
The problem
Every audit lived in three disconnected places:
- Email for coordination with clients and ship owners.
- File-transfer links for sending large inspection reports and raw data.
- A spreadsheet as the single source of truth for what stage every inspection was in.
The result was the usual entropy: links that expired, reports that got buried, and a spreadsheet that only one person fully understood. Clients had no way to get their own reports without asking.
The hard constraint
The most important fact about this project had nothing to do with technology: the primary user was a senior, non-technical maritime professional — decades of expertise, zero patience for software that fights back.
So the entire design leaned the other way: plain language, large readable type, and a layout that mirrored the spreadsheet the team already knew. We weren't introducing a new mental model. We were giving the existing one a better home.
What we built
A single web platform that tracks every audit end to end:
| Capability | What it does |
|---|---|
| Audit lifecycle | Each inspection moves through eight tracked stages, from enquiry to completed — every transition logged. |
| Five audit types | Internal, remote navigation, incident investigation, pre-purchase, and ship-recycling audits. |
| Per-vessel access | Clients see only the specific ships they're granted — not everything their company touches. |
| Self-serve reports | Clients download their own final reports and upload feedback. No more chasing links. |
| Audit log | Every change — stage, file, access grant — is recorded with who did it and when. |
Files moved to proper object storage with resumable uploads and short-lived signed download links. Notifications fire automatically when a report is ready or feedback comes in.
What we learned (again)
- Replace the workflow, don't just digitize it. The win wasn't putting the spreadsheet online. It was collapsing three tools into one and making the client self-serve.
- Design for the actual user, not the average one. Building for a specific non-technical expert made the product better for everyone — clearer, calmer, harder to get wrong.
- Earn the right to add intelligence. With the workflow now structured and the data clean, the obvious next steps — summarizing reports, flagging anomalies across inspections — become genuinely easy. That's not an accident; it's the payoff for getting the foundation right first.
This is what we mean by custom solutions: we don't hand over a prototype and leave. We build the thing, put it in production, and operate it — to the same standard we hold our own products.
Have a workflow that's outgrown its spreadsheet? That's a good place to start a conversation.