Drills

Plan your entire annual drill program in a dedicated yearly planning view. A visual grid gives each vessel and drill its own row, with every planned date of the year, its window and whether the drill was done, giving safety managers and DPAs a complete overview of the emergency preparedness calendar for the year ahead.

Identify gaps in drill coverage, ensure that every required drill type is scheduled within the required timeframes, and balance drill frequency across your fleet. The yearly plan and the fleet calendar come from the same schedules, so every scheduled drill also appears on the calendar.

Conduct formal pre-drill briefings with a dedicated initial meeting structure. The meeting captures time initiated, time completed, meeting notes, company attendees, and ship attendees — creating a documented record that crew were properly briefed before the drill began.

Separate attendee lists for company and ship personnel ensure clear accountability. Time tracking records the duration of the briefing.

Notes capture agenda items, safety reminders, and scenario explanations. The initial meeting record stays with the drill, part of the complete drill package you show in ISM Code audits.

Manage drill participation with precision. Add, remove, and set the full attendee roster for each drill, tracking exactly which crew members participated.

Attendees are selected from the vessel's crew list across 51 on-board ranks spanning deck, engine and hotel departments.

Equally important is absentee tracking: when your company uses it, everyone aboard on the drill date who did not attend is listed as absent automatically, and the list follows every change to the attendees. This dual roster (attendees and absentees) provides complete accountability and ensures that no crew member falls through the cracks in your emergency preparedness program.

On board, ask Navatom AI to draft the drill's scenario (the situation the crew rehearses, its setting, roles and expected actions) or its completion report, or to rewrite the one already written. It works from the drill in front of you: its definition, schedule, attendance and current text.

Nothing is saved until you see the proposal, edit it if you like, and apply it, and only while the drill is in progress. Navatom AI also lists and reads drills, finds the drills due or overdue, alerts you when one runs overdue and sends scheduled reports, and the office's daily brief lists completed drills still waiting for review.

Build comprehensive drill checklists with five question types — Checkbox, Staged, Inquiry, Single Choice, and Multiple Choice. Each checklist item captures the specific criteria your assessors need to evaluate, with structured response formats that drive consistent, comparable results across drills.

Staged items break a question into steps you name, each marked done or not done. Inquiry items capture free-text observations, and any question can carry guidance the crew reads on board. Every answer can take a remark, photos and files, and records who answered and when.

Choice items enforce selection from predefined options. Hierarchical categories organize checklist items into logical sections matching your drill assessment framework.

Mix and match types within a single checklist to match any safety standard.

Plan drill execution with precision using structured timeline entries. Each entry captures a date, start time, end time, and title, creating a minute-by-minute execution plan that drill coordinators and participants can follow during the exercise.

Add, edit, and delete planning events to build a complete drill timeline. From initial muster to final debrief, every phase of the drill is scheduled and visible.

The timeline serves as both a planning tool before the drill and an execution record afterward — documenting exactly how the drill was structured.

Get oversight from both shore and vessel management with a dual-source review system. Company reviews and ship reviews are tracked separately, with independent review counts for each source — ensuring that both office DPAs and vessel masters provide their assessment of drill quality.

Reviews open once the drill is completed, each reviewer edits or removes only their own, and a reviewed drill can no longer be reopened. The separation between company and ship reviews reflects the real-world oversight structure in maritime operations, where shore-based management and vessel leadership evaluate drills from different perspectives with different priorities.

Document drill outcomes with detailed post-drill reports using the built-in rich text editor. Capture observations, lessons learned, improvement recommendations, and corrective actions in a structured narrative format that goes beyond simple checkbox completion.

Attach evidence files — photographs, videos, documents, and forms — directly to the drill record. File management supports adding, removing, and editing attachments with full event tracking.

The combined report and evidence package creates a complete drill record ready for regulatory review or management presentation.

Schedule each released drill for the ships that need it, creating vessel-specific drill obligations that crew can execute according to their operational schedule. A schedule names the drill and the ship, and either one date or a repeat every so many days, weeks, months or years, with an optional window around each date.

On board, the crew starts a scheduled drill from the ship's schedule, or starts one on demand from any released drill when the situation calls for it.

Ship-based scheduling ensures that every vessel in your fleet maintains its required drill program. Drill coordinators can see which drills are scheduled for which vessels, track completion status per ship, and identify vessels that are falling behind their drill schedule.

Build reusable drill definitions with a full six-stage lifecycle. Definitions move through Draft, Waiting for Approval, Completed/Rejected, Released, and Revised stages — ensuring that only approved, controlled drill templates are used for live exercises. Meta statuses (Draft, Released, Deprecated) provide an additional governance layer.

Revise a released definition as a new draft version: the released one stays in use until the new version is approved and released. Mark a definition as an abandon-ship or fire drill, and crew changes use it to check who has taken part.

The versioning system maintains a complete history of every template change, so you always know which version was used for any given drill and can demonstrate template governance during external audits.

Every drill follows a controlled lifecycle from execution through review. A drill is in progress while the crew runs and documents it, and completed once the ship closes it, which locks the checklist, scenario, report and attendance.

Before closing it, the ship can set the date the drill was actually held, and Navatom checks that every attendee was aboard that day.

Once completed, the drill is open to reviews from the office and the ship and to a rating for each attendee. The office can reopen it until the first review is added, so no drill is prematurely closed and every exercise receives proper after-action evaluation.

With the Logbooks module, a drill or exercise entry in the deck logbook can start the drill it records: the one scheduled for the ship, one already under way, or a new one from a released drill definition. A drill started on board can add its own draft entry to the deck logbook in turn.

Each ship's logbook settings decide which of these links apply. The drill and its logbook entry stay linked, and the entry follows the drill when it is reopened. When a drill could not be held, the deck logbook takes a Drill Not Held entry naming the drill and the reason, where SOLAS III/19 asks for the circumstances to be logged.

Schedule drills directly into the Navatom calendar system. Each scheduled drill takes its place on the ship's calendar on its date, with its window if it has one.

Support for both single events and recurring schedules handles everything from one-off emergency exercises to monthly fire drills and quarterly abandon ship drills.

Recurring drill schedules automatically generate future drill events based on your configured frequency. Calendar visibility ensures safety officers, vessel masters, and shore management all see upcoming drills in their planning views — reducing scheduling conflicts and improving participation rates.

Monitor your drill program's health with four dashboard widgets: drills overdue, drills planned in the next 30 days, drills within their window now, and completed drills not yet reviewed.

Widgets provide at-a-glance KPIs for safety officers and DPAs: Which vessels have overdue drills? What is coming up this month?

Which completed drills still wait for review? Each widget also comes as a table of the drills behind its count, for immediate action.

The main Navatom dashboard can show scheduled and unreviewed drills too, and the drill lists show each drill's average rating and review counts.

The office can reopen a completed drill for additional assessment or documentation, until the first review is added. Unlike a rigid one-way workflow, the reopen capability recognizes that drill evaluation is sometimes iterative: new information, additional crew feedback, or management requests may necessitate revisiting a completed drill.

Reopening a drill returns it to in progress and clears its completion date, while the checklist, scenario, report, attendees and ratings stay intact, so the ship continues where it left off. The reopening is recorded in the drill's history with who did it and when, and the drill's calendar slot and linked logbook entry follow.

Every action on a drill is recorded as it happens, with who did it and when: attendees, scenario, timeline, initial meeting, ratings, reviews, files, the report, completion, the held date and any reopening.

Changes to drill definitions are recorded the same way, from each checklist edit to approval and release, giving a step-by-step narrative of every drill and every template change for internal audits and external inspection.