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Dido Steel,
an industrial carrier operating a dedicated fleet of bulk carriers to transport raw materials and finished products for its parent steel company.
The company's DPA was struggling to prove the effectiveness of their Safety Management System (SMS) due to disconnected processes. Audit findings, incident reports, and the SMS documents themselves existed in separate silos, making it nearly impossible to demonstrate a clear, auditable trail of continual improvement.
Dido Steel implemented a focused suite of PRIME Marine's integrated QHSE modules:
Document Management, Incident Management, and the Audit & Inspections Module.
Created a 100% traceable, digital audit trail
from finding to corrective action to procedural change.
Reduced DOC audit preparation time by 90%.
Eliminated all findings
related to SMS version control across the fleet.
Empowered the DPA
to shift from a reactive administrator to a proactive system manager.
At Dido Steel, safety and operational integrity are paramount. Their Designated Person Ashore (DPA), Mr. Alexios Papadopoulos, was responsible for upholding the company's ISM certification. However, the tools at his disposal made this an incredibly challenging task.
"My biggest fear was the external DOC audit," Mr. Papadopoulos admits. "I knew our people were doing good work, but our evidence was scattered everywhere. An audit finding was in one spreadsheet, the incident report that related to it was a PDF in an email archive, and the procedure we updated in the SMS was a Word document on a shared drive. To prove a single 'closed loop' of improvement could take my team days of searching."
This fragmented system created three core issues for the DPA:
“An auditor's job is to test the system. They'll pick one finding and say, 'Show me everything.' If you can't, they will rightly conclude your system is not effective. That was the gap that kept me awake at night.”
- Mr. Alexios Papadopoulos,
DPA,
Dido Steel
Dido Steel chose PRIME Marine to create a single source of truth for their entire safety and compliance workflow. The goal was to build a system where the link between audits, incidents, and documentation was not manual, but automatic and unbreakable.
The power of the integrated system became clear during a routine internal audit.
“This was revolutionary for us,” says Mr. Papadopoulos. “The system created a permanent, digital link between the problem and the solution. The loop was closed.”
1.A Perfect, Unbreakable Audit Trail
When the external DOC audit finally took place, the DPA was prepared. When the auditor asked about the steering gear test finding, Mr. Papadopoulos pulled up the record in PRIME Marine and, in a single screen, showed the entire lifecycle: the original finding, the investigation, the link to the exact document that was revised, the new version, and the date it was published to the fleet. This provided 100% traceability.
2. Drastic Efficiency Gains
The DPA reported that the time his team spent preparing for the external audit was reduced by 90%. What used to take a week of frantic searching now took a few hours of calm report generation.
3. Empowered and Proactive Management
Freed from the burden of manual administration, the DPA could now focus on what his role was truly meant for: analyzing safety trends, identifying areas for proactive improvement, and managing the health of the Safety Management System.
“PRIME Marine didn't just give us software; it gave us control and confidence. During our last audit, the auditor said our system was one of the most transparent and effective he had ever seen. For a DPA, there is no higher praise. The anxiety is gone.”
- Mr. Alexios Papadopoulos,
DPA,
Dido Steel
