Cruise ships inspected by the United States Coast Guard will soon receive a grade, thanks to the Cruise Ship National Center of Expertise (CSNCOE), which has been working on the new system.

“We recognized how well the scoring system for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Vessel Sanitation Programs incentivized positive performance from the ships crews,” wrote Brad Schoenwald Senior Marine Inspector, Cruise Ship National Center of Expertise.

“Their score brought awareness to the public and, more importantly, gave the ships’ crew an identifiable result of how well they were doing to maintain compliance,” he said, in the Center’s newsletter.

“These scores are incorporated as a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) within the major cruise lines’ corporate performance measurements. In developing the Cruise Ship Scorecard, however, the main goal was to provide a measurement of how well Coast Guard examiners performed while completing examinations.”

In 2016, the Center’s Cruise Ship Scorecard project was selected for the Research and Development Test and Evaluation Program by the U.S. Coast Guard Research and Development Center (RDC).

Development began in October of 2018 and the final product, and report, from the RDC was completed last March.

The RDC developed the risk-based methodology using the desire to define a quantitative risk metric found during cruise ship examinations.

The new Scorecard system will measure team performance and provide a human performance incentive with better deficiency data that can be understood and analyzed.

With the Scorecard, identified deficiencies are entered into a database that determines the risk profile associated with each deficiency.

The Scorecard application auto-fills the deficiency cites into the required Port State Control forms, thereby increasing efficiency and eliminating the use of hand-written forms.

According to the Coast Guard, as a performance support tool, it saves the examination team time aboard the ship, and in the office, while producing easy-to-read exam forms.

Ahead of program implementation, each unit conducting cruise ship exams will receive a Surface Pro tablet, pre-loaded with the Scorecard application and associated hardware and software to include training aids and procedures.