Pre-formatted data speeds ENC updates
An entire fleet of chemical tankers managed by Mare Maritime now receives SENC distribution.
The officers of Athens based ship management company Mare Maritime used to spend a full day uploading and updating electronic navigational charts (ENCs) on dual ECDIS.
“We just didn’t know there was any alternative”, said Captain Charis Kanellopoulos. Now they know, and officers spend only 15 minutes on the same task.
Mare Maritime runs eight Type 2 chemical tankers for Empire Chemical Tankers. Each ship has dual ECDIS. Updating each ECDIS required nine base CDs of S-57 data. This took up to eight hours per ECDIS and was a monthly process which could equate to as many as 120 hours per month for the fleet, only for up- loading navigational data.
“This has been a major problem, continued Captain Kanellopoulos. “ We simply spent far too much time updating the ECDIS. And, because it required the ECDIS CD/DVD player to run continuously, we feared the equipment would fail far too quickly.
“We took it for granted that there was no other way. We just figured that this was the time that it took. But seafarers who had served on other ships using C-MAP were certainly frustrated with our system.”
In mid-2010 Jeppesen visited Mare Maritime and introduced an ENC distribution system that would change the equation for Captain Kanellopoulos and his seafarers.
“For three months, we used this on one of our ships on a trial basis, he said. “The officers loved it, only 10-15 minutes to upload a DVD, and they’re done. We decided in a short amount of time to implement the solution across the fleet.”
Electronic chart suppliers that are able to pre-format data for users can provide a radically better service than suppliers who push raw S-57 data. The technology is called SENC distribution. Jeppesen can offer this technology only because it has worked with ECDIS hardware makers since their inception, the capability is wired into these ECDIS terminals.
As a result, there are two different paths to installing an ENC catalog in ECDIS.
1) Many companies provide a stack of CDs full of S-57 data. These need to be installed sequentially in an ECDIS over many hours. The ECDIS slowly converts the raw S-57 data into the format an ECDIS can manipulate (called SENC, for System ENC).
2) Jeppesen is one of very few suppliers who distribute data directly in the SENC format, which goes straight into the ECDIS. The DVD that arrives at the ship takes about 10 minutes to update the ship’s entire ENC catalog. The process is type approved and used by many fleets.
Today, most makes of ECDIS are capable of accepting ENC chart data from Jeppesen packaged as SENC.
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