Spring 2020 Update from Oceanskies Crew

Corona Virus

Oceanskies Crew is pleased to report that we have been able to maintain continuity of service in respect of our crew payroll services even though we have been working from home whilst Guernsey is under lockdown for the Corona Virus.

Our month end March salaries were all paid as usual and we are now working on the payroll requests for the end of this month.

We have also been kept busy by working with social security offices in Malta and the United Kingdom in order to provide seafarers and clients with clarity over the benefits that seafarers can claim during this period as well as assisting with more routine items such as permissions to travel.

We have also made good use this period to achieve two key milestones:

Annual MLC Audit   

We have also passed our annual MLC audit by Lloyd’s Register whilst under lockdown without any observations or deficiencies.

As a company we were always keen to move away from a physical audit with an auditor having to fly over for a day trip to visit our offices. The current situation proved ideal for us to test our II infrastructure and we are pleased that our audit was the first ever ‘virtual’ MLC annual audit performed by Lloyd’s Register who were highly complimentary of our remote working and IT capabilities.

We hope that this will form the blueprint for all future audits reducing the need for unnecessary travel.

CrewMate

We have also been busy working on our Crew App which has undergone a significant update, including a rebrand to 'CrewMate'.

It was decided to rebrand the App with a neutral ‘non-Oceanskies’ branding at the request of some of the existing yacht managers with whom we are working and also as a result of feedback received on the road talking to new prospective management clients.

Developed entirely in-house by the Oceanskies software development team, the ‘CrewMate’ App is an optional add on to our crew payroll service that can be downloaded free of charge from the Android or Apple store by all seafarers that we are employing on behalf of our client yacht owners and/or yacht managers.

Once activated the ‘CrewMate’ App enables all seafarers to enjoy real time access to their employment information and there is a significant back end capability that in theory can be plugged into any existing yacht management system that any owner or manager already has in place.

We have updated our online guide to provide a full overview of the App’s capabilities and free download through the following link on this website: 

https://oceanskies.com/yacht-crew/crewmate-app-guide

Owners, Managers and seafarers are all welcome to contact us for a free trial login to activate the App.

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