The Digital Work Permit:

How KIOS S.A. Gained Total Control of High-Risk Jobs.

The Customer:

KIOS S.A.,

a well-established and safety-conscious Greek owner and operator of a fleet of Handymax and Supramax bulk carriers.

The Challenge:

Their paper-based Permit to Work (PTW) system was cumbersome and created significant administrative work and compliance risks. Tracking the status of active permits across the fleet was difficult, and ensuring every single procedural step was followed and signed off correctly was a constant challenge.

The Solution:

KIOS S.A. implemented PRIME Marine's Forms Manager module to completely digitize their entire Permit to Work system, from initiation to closure.

KEY RESULTS:

100% Procedural Adherence

on all high-risk jobs, thanks to mandatory digital workflows.

50% Reduction

in the administrative time required to issue, track, and close a permit.

Real-time, fleet-wide visibility

of all active high-risk work for the DPA and superintendents.

Created a perfect, time-stamped audit trail

for every permit ever issued.

The Challenge: The Inherent Risks of a Paper Permit System

At KIOS S.A., safety is the highest priority. Their procedures for high-risk jobs like hot work, enclosed space entry, and working aloft were excellent, but the paper-based permit system used to control them was a source of inefficiency and potential risk.

"The paper permit is a classic tool, but it has classic weaknesses," says Mr. Georgios Petrakis, the DPA for KIOS S.A. "A permit would be filled out, but maybe one signature from a required officer was missed in the rush. A permit would be issued, but the copy on the bridge might not be the same as the one at the worksite. And for me, in the shore office, I had no real-time visibility. I didn't know if there were three hot work permits active on a vessel or none. I had to rely on a weekly email summary."

This manual system created several critical issues:

Risk of Human Error: The reliance on manual checks and physical signatures created the potential for a critical safety step to be missed.
Lack of Visibility: Management ashore had no live overview of the high-risk work being conducted across their fleet at any given moment.
Cumbersome Audit Trail: Preparing for an audit required manually collecting and collating hundreds of paper permits from vessels, a time-consuming and inefficient process.

“A Permit to Work is a contract of safety between the Master, the officers, and the crew. A paper system relies on hope. We needed a digital system that was built on certainty.”

- Mr. Georgios Petrakis,

DPA, KIOS S.A.

The Solution: A Digital Workflow for Critical Safety Control

KIOS S.A. used PRIME Marine's Forms Manager to transform their PTW process into a completely digital, transparent, and controlled workflow.

1.
A Central Library of Digital Permits: They created digital versions of all their critical permits (Hot Work, Enclosed Space Entry, Working Aloft, etc.) as master templates in the system.
2.
Integration with Risk Assessment: The system was configured so that a Risk Assessment identifying a high-risk job would automatically prompt the user that a Permit to Work was required.
3.
A Seamless, Sequential Approval Workflow: This was the most powerful change. When a Chief Officer initiates a Hot Work permit on his tablet, the system automatically routes it for digital sign-off. The Chief Engineer must sign off on the machinery isolations first. Only then is it sent to the Master for final approval. The system makes it procedurally impossible to skip a step.
4.
Centralized Archive: Once a permit is issued, the work is carried out and the permit is closed, the permit is automatically moved to a secure, searchable digital archive.

The Results: A New Era of Control and Confidence

By digitizing their most critical safety process, KIOS S.A. achieved a new level of operational integrity.

1. Ironclad Procedural Compliance

The mandatory, sequential digital workflow ensured 100% procedural adherence for every permit issued. This completely eliminated the risk of a high-risk job commencing without the full, required authorization, significantly strengthening their safety barrier.

2. Real-Time Risk Oversight for Management

The live dashboard gave the DPA and superintendents real-time, fleet-wide visibility of all high-risk work. "I can now see, at a glance, that a vessel has an active Enclosed Space Entry permit. I can even click to see the details," says Mr. Petrakis. "This level of oversight was impossible before."

3. Drastic Efficiency Gains

The elimination of paper, printing, and physical signature chasing resulted in a 50% reduction in the administrative time required to process a permit from start to finish. This freed up senior officers to spend more time supervising the work itself, rather than the paperwork.

“PRIME Marine has transformed our most critical safety process. Our permits are now clear, consistent, and controlled. It gives our crews a better tool, it gives our officers more control, and it gives me, as the DPA, complete confidence that our procedures are being followed, every single time.”