TL;DR: We’ve refocused MarControl on crew management and dropped most non-HR modules. Scroll to the bottom of the post for a list of which modules are staying and which are being sunset.

Since our founding in 2013, and until last year, our growth strategy was horizontal. Every year we would build new non-crewing modules in response to customer requests, with the ultimate goal of becoming a do-everything ship management suite. This didn’t work as well as expected, for two reasons:

Diluted Focus on Crew Management: First, it took our focus away from our crew management core, and frankly, we ended up doing more things, less well. We didn’t have the resources to do everything all at once, the way that larger players in the industry do.

Industry Reality Check: Second, I don’t actually believe that a software suite truly exists that does absolutely everything a shipowner / operator needs, especially as new regulations come into play, and as software becomes capable of doing more and more. Most of our business now comes from customers who already have software suites in place, from the aforementioned larger marine management software players, but find themselves needing a powerful, focused crewing solution. The really smart larger players recognize that they can’t do everything either, and are turning to partnerships with companies like MarControl to provide complementary capabilities. Stay tuned for an announcement about this, by the way!

This all means we have decided to narrow our focus almost exclusively on our Crewing-related modules, which were already our most developed and powerful. We’ve kept two non-Crewing modules because they are heavily used by our customers.

I can’t deny the theoretical appeal of large suites to customers. You get a lot in one place, you only have to deal with one vendor, and it all comes pre-integrated. As we switch from a horizontal strategy to a vertical one focused on crewing, we’ll have to keep offering strong counterarguments to the horizontal approach:

1) Offer super powerful Crew Management software, more appealing than what’s found in the large suites.

2) Play nice with other software. We’re always going to be in multi-vendor environments, so we need to offer a great API and a helpful and eager approach to integrations. The more built-in integrations we can offer by default the better (again, look forward to an announcement here).

3) Be our customers’ favourite vendor. Keep up our high-participation, caring approach. Keep working harder than anyone else to make customers happy.

Here’s the list of what’s staying and what’s no longer being offered to new customers.

STAYING:

– MarControl Core Crewing (formerly known as CrewControl)

– Crew Timesheets

– Crew Rotation Planning

– Seafarer Expense Reporting

– Seafarer Communications

– Ship and Equipment Certificate Management (this is not crewing, but is so widely used that we’re keeping it)

– Commercial Logs and Ship Performance Analytics (another non-crewing module, this one being kept for sentimental reasons because it’s really great)

SUNSET:

– Ship Inspection Management

– Ship-to-Shore Reporting and Safety

– Auxiliary Equipment Maintenance Management

– Purchasing

NOTE: Customers currently using these modules may continue to use them indefinitely, and will continue to receive support.

This renewed focus allows us to excel in our specialty, providing unmatched crew management software.

– Maxime Camirand, CEO