# Deficiencies (DEF)
Navatom Deficiencies tracks PSC, class and crew findings with their codes, detention grounds and verified actions, on board or ashore, even offline.

URL: https://navatom.com/products/deficiencies
Category: [Issues](https://navatom.com/products/category/issues)
Runs on: Office, Ship

## Overview
Navatom Deficiencies is the operational workhorse for tracking every type of deficiency across your fleet — from discovery to root cause analysis, corrective action, and verified closure. Whether an issue is found during an internal walkthrough, a port state inspection, or an equipment check, Deficiencies gives your team one place to log it, investigate it, assign responsibility, and close it with a full paper trail.
Built around a six-stage lifecycle, every deficiency moves through a clear progression from initial reporting through investigation, corrective action, and final resolution. Rules-based root cause analysis with standard and company-defined cause trees ensures consistent investigation across all vessels.
Three types of corrective action — interim, corrective, and preventive — give your team the flexibility to contain an issue immediately while working on the permanent fix and the systemic prevention.
Audit findings convert directly into tracked deficiencies with a single action, carrying forward all evidence and context. Equipment and ship section linkage connects every deficiency to the physical asset involved.
Fleet-wide dashboards, analytics, and a complete audit trail make Deficiencies the foundation of your continuous improvement program.

## Key figures
- 6 Issue Lifecycle Stages
- 3 Corrective Action Types
- 5 Cause Categories
- 27 Deficiency KPIs

## Features
- **Port State Control & Class Details**: A deficiency found by port State control records the regime that inspected the vessel, such as the Paris MoU, the Tokyo MoU or the US Coast Guard, and the deficiency and action codes in force on the day it was found. It also records whether it was grounds for detention and whether the recognized organization was responsible, and a deficiency found by class records whether it is a condition of class or a memorandum.
  - Paris MoU, Tokyo MoU, USCG and other regimes
  - Deficiency and action codes in force on the day
  - Due dates proposed from the action code
  - Grounds for detention and RO responsibility
  - Condition of class or memorandum
- **Interim, Corrective & Preventive Actions**: Address deficiencies at three levels: interim actions contain the immediate risk, corrective actions fix the specific problem, and preventive actions address the underlying system weakness. Each action has its own due date, and the office verifies it once it is done. This three-tier approach mirrors best practice in maritime safety management. An interim action might restrict equipment use while a corrective action replaces a faulty component and a preventive action updates the maintenance schedule to prevent recurrence. All three are tracked independently with full accountability. The office verifies each completed action or sends it back. Later it reviews verified actions for effect, and an action found not effective opens again, to be done and verified once more.
  - Interim actions contain immediate risk
  - Corrective actions fix the specific problem
  - Preventive actions address system weakness
  - Office review for effectiveness
- **Works Offline, On Board and Ashore**: Deficiencies can be reported, updated and worked on with no connection, on the ship app and the office app, photos included. Changes wait on the device and are sent when the connection returns, and any conflict with a change made elsewhere is shown to you. Deficiencies can also be reported and worked on in the Navatom mobile app for iPhone and Android, offline too.
  - Report and update with no connection
  - Photos and files wait on the device
  - Sent when the connection returns
  - Conflicts shown to the user
  - On the ship app and the office app
  - On the Navatom mobile app
  - Some actions wait for the connection
- **Rules-Based Root Cause Analysis**: Investigate the real cause behind every deficiency using a structured root cause system, the standard one or your company’s own. Rather than relying on free-text descriptions that vary between investigators, the rules-based system ensures consistent, comparable analysis across all vessels and all deficiency types. Each root cause category is designed around recognized maritime investigation frameworks. When your team selects a root cause, the system captures not just what went wrong, but why — building a fleet-wide knowledge base that reveals systemic patterns and prevents recurrence.
  - Standard and custom root cause systems
  - Consistent analysis across all vessels
  - Fleet-wide root cause pattern detection
  - Maritime investigation framework alignment
- **Repeats Across the Fleet**: The office marks a deficiency as a repeat of an earlier one on the same vessel, and both records show the link on a Repeats tab, on both apps. Problems that keep coming back stay visible instead of closing quietly one at a time.
  - Repeats linked by the office
  - Shown on both apps
  - Earlier and later decided by date and time
  - Company deficiencies compared with their own
  - Likely repeats suggested by Navatom AI
- **Six-Stage Issue Lifecycle**: Every deficiency follows a controlled six-stage progression from initial discovery through to verified resolution. The lifecycle ensures that no issue can be prematurely closed without completing the required investigation, corrective action, and verification steps. Clear status visibility at every stage means your DPA, fleet superintendent, and vessel master always know exactly where each deficiency stands. Overdue items are immediately visible, and stage transitions are enforced to maintain process discipline across your entire fleet.
  - Controlled progression from discovery to closure
  - Stage transition enforcement
  - Overdue visibility at every stage
  - No premature closure without verification
- **Postponement Management**: When the work on a deficiency can only be done in a dry dock, the office postpones it to a scheduled or started dry dock of its vessel, with a reason. The dry dock gets a task for it, and closing the deficiency completes the task. Each postponement and each cancellation is recorded in the deficiency's event history. Cancelling a postponement removes the task from the dry dock.
  - A reason for every postponement
  - Only users with the postpone right
  - Full postponement history preserved
  - A dry dock task for each postponement
- **Audit Finding Conversion**: When an audit finding warrants formal tracking, convert it into a deficiency with a single action. The conversion carries forward all evidence, observations, and context from the original finding, creating a fully documented deficiency record ready for root cause analysis and corrective action. No duplicate data entry, no lost context. The permanent link between the audit finding and the resulting deficiency means your compliance team can trace any corrective action back to the specific assessment observation that triggered it.
  - One-action finding conversion
  - Evidence & context carry-forward
  - Permanent finding-deficiency linkage
  - No duplicate data entry
- **Equipment & Ship Section Linkage**: Connect every deficiency directly to the equipment item or ship section where it was found. This linkage transforms your deficiency records from a flat list of issues into an equipment-aware intelligence system that reveals which assets generate the most problems. When a deficiency is linked to a specific piece of equipment, your maintenance team gains immediate context: What other deficiencies has this equipment had? Is there a pattern? Should the maintenance schedule be adjusted? Equipment linkage turns individual deficiencies into actionable maintenance intelligence.
  - Direct equipment item linkage
  - Ship section identification
  - Equipment deficiency history
  - Maintenance intelligence integration
- **Rule Book References**: Link a deficiency to the rules it breaks, chosen clause by clause from the rule books available for whoever found it, such as the ISM Code. Navatom keeps the rule books, and the Rules tab lists each rule under its book with its clause number and text.
  - Rules chosen clause by clause
  - Rule books matched to who found it
  - Clause number and text on the record
  - Rule books kept by Navatom
- **Priority & Severity Classification**: Classify every deficiency by both priority and severity to ensure the most critical issues receive immediate attention. Priority determines how urgently the issue must be addressed; severity captures the potential impact on safety, compliance, or operations. This dual classification drives your team's workflow: high-priority, high-severity deficiencies appear at the top of every list and dashboard. Lower-severity observations are still tracked but don't crowd out the issues that need immediate action.
  - Dual priority and severity ratings
  - Critical issues surface automatically
  - Dashboard-driven urgency ranking
  - Proportionate response guidance
- **Ship & Office Issue Tracking**: Track deficiencies from both ship and office environments in a single unified system. Issues discovered onboard are visible to shore management immediately, and office-initiated deficiencies are communicated to vessel crews without manual handoff. The dual-context approach ensures that your DPA sees the same deficiency data as the vessel master. Whether an issue is raised by a crew member during a routine check or by a superintendent during a vessel visit, it enters the same workflow with the same accountability.
  - Unified ship and shore visibility
  - No manual handoff required
  - Real-time status synchronization
  - DPA and master see same data
  - Company deficiencies from office audits
- **Crew Assignment & Responsibility**: Assign each deficiency to the officer ranks who work on it on board and to the people who follow it in the office. Several can be assigned to one deficiency, and each sees it on their own dashboard.
  - Named responsibility per deficiency
  - Multiple assignments supported
  - Ship ranks and office staff
  - Notification on assignment
- **Calendar Integration & Scheduling**: Each deficiency's due date appears on its vessel's calendar, or on the company calendar for a company deficiency, with its ship and company assignees. The fleet calendar shows deficiencies beside audits, drills, training, certificates and dry docks, so the deadline is planned with everything else.
  - Due dates on the vessel's calendar
  - Company deficiencies on the company calendar
  - Shown with their assignees
  - Beside audits, drills and dry docks
- **Confidential Reporting**: An administrator can mark a deficiency confidential when the issue needs discretion. When your company's settings hide confidential records, it is left out of lists, search and dashboards for everyone except administrators, and a vessel's own settings can hide it on the ship app too. A healthy safety culture depends on open reporting. Confidential reporting removes barriers that might prevent crew members from flagging critical safety issues, equipment problems, or procedural gaps that they observe in their daily work.
  - Restricted visibility for sensitive issues
  - Visible to administrators only
  - Encourages honest safety reporting
  - No-reprisal reporting environment
- **Analytics & Dashboard**: Seven dashboard widgets show your deficiencies and the fleet's that are overdue or in progress, new ones waiting to be accepted, unassigned ones, and those postponed to a dry dock. Each shows as a count or as a table you can open, for the vessels you choose.
  - 7 dashboard widgets
  - Overdue, new and unassigned at a glance
  - Postponed work tracked to its dry dock
  - Yours or the whole fleet's
- **Deficiency Analytics**: Two pages of deficiency analytics. Flow shows how deficiencies move through their statuses and where they wait; Root Causes shows which causes come back across the fleet.
  - Time spent in each status
  - Root causes across the fleet
- **Fleet-Wide Archive & History**: Access the complete history of every deficiency across your entire fleet. Closed deficiencies remain searchable and filterable, building an institutional knowledge base that supports trend analysis, recurring issue identification, and continuous improvement. When a similar deficiency appears on another vessel, your team can search the archive for previous resolution approaches. The fleet-wide history turns past experience into a competitive advantage for safety and operational excellence.
  - Full fleet deficiency history
  - Searchable closed records
  - Previous resolution lookup
  - Trend analysis support
- **Rich Descriptions & File Attachments**: Document every deficiency with detailed descriptions and supporting evidence. Attach photographs, inspection reports, certificates, technical drawings, and any other files that help investigators understand and resolve the issue. Rich documentation turns a brief deficiency note into a complete investigation package. When a corrective action team picks up the deficiency, they have all the context they need — photographs of the condition, relevant documents, and detailed observations — without chasing additional information.
  - Detailed narrative descriptions
  - Photo and document attachments
  - Technical drawing support
  - Complete investigation package
- **Threaded Comments & Collaboration**: Discuss deficiencies in context with threaded comments attached directly to each record. Ship and shore personnel can exchange updates, ask questions, and share progress without switching to email or messaging applications. The comment thread becomes part of the permanent deficiency record. Every discussion, decision, and clarification is captured in chronological order, creating a complete narrative of how the issue was investigated and resolved.
  - In-context discussion threads
  - Ship-shore collaboration
  - Permanent comment record
  - Chronological decision narrative
- **Complete Audit Trail**: Every action on a deficiency is recorded in its event history, with who did it and when. From initial creation through status changes, root cause updates, corrective action assignments, equipment linkage, and final closure — the audit trail captures it all. The event log is not just a technical record — it is your compliance evidence. When an inspector asks "who approved this closure?" or "when was the root cause updated?", the answer is immediately available with full user attribution and timestamps.
  - Every change, with who and when
  - Full user attribution per event
  - Kept with their full history
  - Instant compliance evidence

## Technical abilities
- **High-Performance Issue Grids with Advanced Filtering**: All deficiency views use high-performance data grids with advanced filtering by status, priority, severity, vessel, equipment, and date range. Browse thousands of deficiency records without performance degradation.
- **Rules-Based Root Cause Engine**: Standard and company-defined root cause systems drive consistent investigation across the fleet. The engine enforces structured analysis rather than free-text descriptions, enabling fleet-wide root cause pattern detection.
- **Audit-to-Deficiency Conversion Workflow**: Audit findings convert to formal deficiencies through an automated workflow that carries forward all evidence, observations, and regulatory references. The conversion maintains permanent bidirectional linkage for full traceability.
- **Automated Lifecycle Management**: The six-stage lifecycle is managed by an automated workflow that enforces stage transition rules, validates data completeness at each gate, and triggers notifications for responsible parties.
- **Complete Event History**: Every action on a deficiency is recorded as it happens, with who did it and when. The same record feeds the audit trail, notifications and dashboards.
- **Office-Ship Synchronization**: Deficiencies are kept on the device, so you can keep working on them in the ship app and the office app with no connection. Changes and photos wait in an outbox and are sent when the connection returns, and any conflict is shown to the user rather than resolved silently.
- **Configurable Analytics Framework**: Dashboard widgets and analytics are built on a configurable framework that aggregates deficiency data across multiple dimensions — status, priority, severity, vessel, equipment category, and time period.

## Benefits
- **Every Operational Issue Tracked from Discovery to Resolution**: From the moment a deficiency is discovered to its final verified closure, every step is documented, assigned, and tracked. No issue falls through the cracks, no corrective action is forgotten, and no resolution goes unverified.
- **Root Cause Analysis That Prevents Recurrence**: Rules-based root cause analysis with standard and company-defined cause trees ensures your team investigates the real cause, not just the symptom. Fleet-wide root cause patterns reveal systemic issues that one-off fixes would miss.
- **Seamless Audit-to-Deficiency Conversion**: Audit findings convert to tracked deficiencies in one step, carrying forward all evidence and context. Your compliance team spends time resolving issues, not re-entering data from audit reports.
- **Fleet-Wide Deficiency Intelligence**: Dashboards show what is overdue, new or unassigned across your fleet, and root causes and repeats show which problems keep coming back. Put your attention where it will have the greatest impact on safety and compliance.
- **Audit-Ready Records from Day One**: Every action on every deficiency is kept in its event history, with who did it and when. When inspectors and auditors ask for evidence, the answer is always one click away.
- **Scales from Single Vessel to Global Fleet**: Fast lists, work that carries on with no connection, and the same workflow on every vessel mean the module performs the same whether you manage one vessel or five hundred.

## Frequently asked questions
### What types of deficiencies can the module track?
Navatom Deficiencies tracks any operational issue — from equipment failures and procedural gaps to safety observations and regulatory findings. The module handles deficiencies from internal inspections, port state control, classification society surveys, management visits, and any other source. Each deficiency is classified by priority and severity and linked to the equipment or ship section involved.

### How does root cause analysis work?
The module uses root cause systems: a standard one and any your company defines, each a tree of causes for the issue types it covers. When investigating a deficiency, your team selects the applicable cause, ensuring consistent analysis across all vessels. Over time, fleet-wide root cause patterns become visible, revealing systemic issues that require management attention.

### Can audit findings be converted into deficiencies automatically?
Yes. When an audit or inspection finding warrants formal tracking, it converts to a deficiency with a single action. All evidence, observations, and context carry forward, and a permanent link is maintained between the original finding and the resulting deficiency for full traceability.

### What corrective action types are supported?
Three types: interim actions contain the immediate risk, corrective actions fix the specific problem, and preventive actions address the underlying system weakness. Each action has its own due date and is verified or sent back by the office once it is done. Later, the office reviews verified actions for effectiveness, and an action found not effective opens again.

### Does the module work offline on vessels?
Yes. Deficiencies are kept on the device, so you can keep working on them in the ship app and the office app with no connection: report a deficiency, add photos, record actions and comments. Changes wait on the device and are sent when the connection returns, and any conflict with a change made elsewhere is shown to you. Some steps, such as root causes from the systems Navatom provides, wait for the connection.

### How does the module support confidential reporting?
An administrator can mark a deficiency confidential. When your company's settings hide confidential records, it is left out of lists, search and dashboards for everyone except administrators, and a vessel's own settings can hide it on the ship app too. Sensitive issues stay on record without being in front of everyone.

### What analytics and reporting capabilities are available?
Seven dashboard widgets show the deficiencies that are overdue, in progress, new, unassigned or postponed to a dry dock, for you or for the whole fleet. The current list and the archive filter by vessel, status, priority, severity and date, and export to Excel or CSV. Every change is kept in each deficiency's event history, with who made it and when.

### Does Navatom record port State control codes and detentions?
Yes. A deficiency found by port State control records the regime, such as the Paris MoU, the Tokyo MoU or the US Coast Guard, with the deficiency code and the action code in force on the day it was found. Navatom keeps the code lists for every regime. Each deficiency also records whether it was grounds for detention, whether the recognized organization was responsible, and whether it was ISM-related or accidental damage.

### Can Navatom AI help with deficiencies?
Yes. Navatom AI drafts the title and description of a deficiency and its interim, corrective and preventive actions, working from the record. It also lists open deficiencies by vessel, equipment, severity, priority or due date. Each draft opens for you to edit, and nothing is saved until you confirm.

## Related modules
- [Non-Conformities](https://navatom.com/products/non-conformities): Manage non-conformity reports, root cause analysis, and corrective actions.
- [Accidents](https://navatom.com/products/accidents): Report and investigate accidents with structured investigation workflows.
- [Near Misses](https://navatom.com/products/near-misses): Capture near-miss reports to promote proactive safety culture across the fleet.
- [Technical Findings](https://navatom.com/products/technical-findings): Document technical findings from surveys, inspections, and maintenance activities.

Start a free trial: https://app.navatom.com/trial
Book a demo: https://navatom.com/contact