Mintra launches new Insights data reporting tool

A new data reporting tool that will help clients make fully informed business-critical decisions has been launched to complement Mintra’s human capital management (HCM) software. Insights aims to streamline the often complex process of data collection by automatically extracting information from multiple sources, consolidating it and presenting it in a series of interactive dashboards.

Insights will ensure that managers across all business departments, from crewing administrators focused on logistics to accountants who need to determine the financial impact of workforce resourcing, have easy and immediate access to relevant data reports.

The tool is currently available for use with Mintra’s complete crew management software, OCS HR, with plans to introduce Insights for learning and competency management system Trainingportal at a later date. It has been developed in partnership with system users, who helped to determine the five separate data dashboards used in the initial launch phase.

Users will be able to access dashboards that display the crew members that are on board a vessel at any one time; analyse past and future crew activities; get a full-time equivalent oversight on sailing days per year, vessel, rank and nationality; generate a report on monthly sailing days; and analyse sick leave data.

The interactive dashboards use Microsoft Power BI and while five have been created at this stage, clients have the option to request the development of bespoke dashboards specific to their own company requirements. Dashboards are refreshed once a day, but it is possible to request that data is updated on a more frequent basis to ensure real-time analytics.

Mintra group innovation director Paul Munro said that Insights allowed all those in an organisation to access and use the vast quantities of data generated by OCS HR - not just those who have working knowledge of the software.

He added: “OCS HR is widely regarded as one of the most complete crew management systems on the market. While our clients enjoy significant benefits from using such an extensive system, the sheer volume of data is also problematic.

“Insights automatically collects, consolidates and presents all of that data, helping our clients to make sense of it and to use it to make important strategic decisions that impact on the success of their business.

“For example, a crew planner might decide to appoint an additional chief officer on board a vessel after viewing the full-time equivalent dashboard and realising chief officers are working more hours than they are scheduled to.

“An HR officer might look at the dashboard we have created for sick leave and identify higher than usual rates of absence following a change to shift patterns. This helps them to address potential issues that may be impacting on operations.”

Paul explained that it was not only difficult for OCS HR users to see the overall story because of the volume of data available, but also time consuming to extract and manually consolidate the different information streams.

“Insights automates that whole process and vastly reduces the amount of time and resource that needs to be dedicated to reporting. It would also be the case that only administrators of OCS HR would know where to find and extract the data, but users do not need to have any knowledge of the software at all in order to access and understand the Power BI dashboards.

“The dashboards present the data in an intuitive, efficient and interactive way. Insights has had excellent feedback from clients, and we believe it will be instrumental in helping them use data to make a long-term positive impact on their business,” he said.

Request a Demo of Insights here >