In today’s globally connected world, with rising numbers of imports and exports and an industry incorporating the latest trade trends into its work, the shipping sector is fast-evolving – and time is of the essence.
Given the importance of time in securing and advancing day-to-day shipping operations, digital tools need to provide efficiencies to enable smooth, speedy, and seamless business activity.
Our recent Return on Investment (ROI) study of maritime customers has revealed that, on average, when using SEDNA as the preferred email management platform, users save two hours per day which would otherwise have been spent manually filing, archiving, searching, tagging, forwarding, storing and contextualising their emails.
It is often said that ‘time is money’, so, using the average ship operator salary in the US as a benchmark ($66,577 per year or $5,548 per month), we calculated that this, therefore, saves $1,280 worth of employee time every month–or $15,360 per year.
Listen to our customers saving time every day thanks to SEDNA: Norvic Shipping | Ardmore Shipping | Casper Group
To put this into context a team of five Operators, each saving two hours per day, is equivalent to having an extra full-time employee. Imagine what you could do with an additional Operator? You could manage more vessels and voyages to capitalise on revenue and growth opportunities.
Read on to learn more about the advanced and unique features disrupting the maritime industry and giving two hours per day per user back to users.
Important tab – never miss your important messages
SEDNA believes email is personal and what is deemed as important – and deserves attention – is different from user to user. So, we’ve created an ‘Important’ tab within SEDNA providing a dedicated and convenient space for a curated list, showcasing the items you mark as high priority.
Instead of using complex algorithms or forcing you to create complicated rules to mark emails as important, we’ve made it action-triggered and under the control of you, the user.
There are four actions you can take that will tell SEDNA that an email is important to you and will route them to the Important tab. Your emails are deemed important when:
You Follow a message – all your Following messages will appear in your Important tab so you can complete required actions and tasks before following up on them.
There is also a dedicated view for messages you are following in the Following tab.
Mark a Contact as Important – incoming messages from a marked contact classed as important will appear in your Important tab.
Mark a Job as Important – incoming messages with a marked Job Tag will be classed as important and ready for you to process in your Important tab.
Colleagues tag you in a SEDNA message – these emails are automatically routed to the Important tab, making it easy for you to quickly catch up on message chains or follow up on messages.
Comments – don’t delay replying and reduce email volume by as much as 50%
The Comment feature is easy to use and accessible when opening up the SEDNA Context Panel. It allows you to speak to your internal team about a message, without having to hit the ‘Reply All’ button and create lengthy email chains.
By commenting and seeing activities for a specific message all in one space, this reduces the risk of miscommunication that may occur, while also allowing you to triage and discuss with colleagues to improve response time.
With the Comments feature, you will be able to:
Avoid forwarding messages or replying to all by tagging colleagues to emails that may be relevant to them.
This marks the email as important for the tagged colleague and it will be routed to their Important tab. Tagged colleagues also become Followers of the message so they can follow up when ready.
Reduce delays in replying and ensure accurate emails every time by triaging emails with relevant colleagues and seeing up-to-date information relating to the email before you reply.
Bookmarks – find the right email lightning fast
On average it takes users up to 40 seconds to find the right email. With SEDNA, this is dramatically reduced to 5 seconds. SEDNA also helps you to respond quickly to emails as research shows email users delay replying 37% of the time as they can’t easily find emails and attachments.
Bookmarks allow you to apply advanced filters, in one click, to change your message list view based on your defined search criteria.
Bookmarks use our powerful search capabilities so you can:
Search based on teams, tags, keywords, or a combination of these that are specific to you.
Each search is unique to you and if you use it regularly enough then save it as a Bookmark.
Your Bookmarks are listed on the SEDNA Sidebar for easy access so you can use them with one click.
Buckets – instant notification of emails that need your attention
When dealing with high-volume email environments as SEDNA users do, a lot of time is wasted on full inboxes. As much as 27 minutes per day. SEDNA power users get this time back in their calendars by using Buckets to get instant notifications on urgent priority emails that specifically meet their search criteria.
Using Buckets will allow you to:
Make up to five buckets and get instant notifications based on specific search criteria such as keywords, VIP contacts, tags, or a combination of these.
Have searches saved already as a Bookmark? Turn a Bookmark into a Bucket with one click.
Don’t fall into the “Urgency Trap”, where everything becomes urgent by default.
Get instant notifications on emails that are urgent based on your classification of urgency e.g. notification of messages that have “urgent”, “cancel”, or “problem” keywords within it.
Proven success
With SEDNA and our innovative features, you get back 2 hours per day by managing emails better, collaborating with colleagues and teams with ease and integrating with best-in-class technology, such as Veson, Dataloy, ABRAXA, and AXSMarine to achieve effortless operations onshore and offshore.
Look out for our next blog where we deep dive into each of our unique features and highlight more use cases that save you time and make you feel more in control of your emails.