Running a fleet of large RO-RO ferries is a complex undertaking. Multiple sailings per day between multiple ports can bring many communications challenges. The customer chose SARK because it gave them a single telephony view across multiple PBX nodes and endpoints with simple desk-to-desk dialling across all of their offices and ships.

One of the things we didn’t expect was the requirement for co-ordinated incident handling. In the real world, sometimes things don’t go as planned. Something unexpected happens onboard a ship or at a remote office. It might be a component failure, or a passenger becoming unwell, or a myriad other unforeseen events that require fast co-ordinated decision making. The customer wanted an easy-to-use system that could bring the correct decision makers and interested parties together quickly when incidents occurred.

Working with the customer we created a sub-directory of incident numbers, one for each incident type, together with a ruleset for each one. When an incident number is dialled SARK accesses the corresponding ruleset and begins calling and texting the relevant personnel. It recognises both decision makers and interested parties. Decision makers are contacted either at their desk and/or their cellphone and automatically bridged into a conference where the incident can be discussed and action taken. Interested parties receive SMS messages informing them that an incident is ongoing so they can standby to assist.

This is a perfect example of the requirement for an extensible system. The work to design, develop, deploy and test this solution was less than a week in elapsed time and it allows the customer to rapidly handle incidents correctly and quickly. Moreover, because the rulesets are defined in simple tables, they can handle the adds moves and changes themselves.