Marine-rescue firm turns to technology to stay afloat

STAYING AFLOAT: Pete Andrews, vice president at Safe/Sea, describes the company's iPad application to Christina Hopper at the R.I. Boat Show in January. / PBN PHOTO/DAVID LEVESQUE
STAYING AFLOAT: Pete Andrews, vice president at Safe/Sea, describes the company's iPad application to Christina Hopper at the R.I. Boat Show in January. / PBN PHOTO/DAVID LEVESQUE

Tablets have become an indispensible part of business for Safe/Sea marine rescue. The North Kingstown company is always on the lookout for technology innovations and utilizes iPads for everything from contacting their captains, to monitoring weather conditions and capturing a client’s signature at the end of a job.
In the past, “The captains would have to come in at the end of the shift with that piece of paper [bearing a client’s signature] and collate that with the printed case report,” said Pete Andrews, vice president, co-founder and minority owner of the company which began rescuing boats in Rhode Island waters in 1984 when the U.S. Coast Guard stopped providing free towing service in nonemergency situations.
Clear and effective communication tools are the foundation of the company’s business, which dispatches 50 to 60 rescues on an average summer weekend when batteries die, gas runs out or mechanical failures occur.
Safe/Sea, which has six rescue towboats, made its bet on Apple products from the beginning.
“We’ve been a Mac-based business for more than 20 years. We run the entire place off of a FileMaker database that I designed and developed,” Andrews said.
He had no informal information technology training but developed the database out of “business necessity” and now the entire company’s operations are based on it, he said.
And FileMaker Inc., a subsidiary of Apple Inc., was just the beginning for the small company.
Safe/Sea has bought every generation of iPhone – except for latest – and iPad since their first launch.
In the old days, a dispatcher would receive a call on a landline, and then contact a captain using a walkie-talkie. The captain would then have to jot down the information, head over to the ship and get out to sea without losing that piece of paper.
“[The iPads] cut down dramatically on the time that is required to transmit the information,” Andrews said, adding: “There are no errors in transmission. A lot of times, our boats – they can be noisy.” And, they’re eco-friendly. Before, Safe/Sea would generate between six to eight pieces of paper with every job – and that adds up when you have about a thousand rescues a year.
“[Now] we produce zero paper. All that information goes into the computer,” Andrews said, noting that he has been in the business for more than 25 years and has seen everything from boats on fire to a boat that was “basically cut in half.”
Although a small company – with approximately five full-time staff and three part-timers – Safe/Sea has managed to stay afloat during a recession that battered the rest of the marine industry.
The firm’s survival, Andrews noted, was partly due to going mobile.
“It reduces our costs by not having people sitting by a landline phone all the time or chained to a desk so they don’t miss anything – we can be completely mobile,” he said. There has been less boating since 2008 but “we’ve been able to become more efficient – cut out costs – and everyone is still gainfully employed.”
Andrews didn’t have an estimate ready on how much the company spends on Apple products annually but noted that he has been able to recoup a lot of the costs by reselling the iPhones on eBay.
Andrews has also taken the FileMaker database he developed out of a business necessity and has turned it into a new business venture.
“We developed [this version of the] application and used it for the last year; it has been so successful [for us] I decided to modify it to make it more universal for other companies,” he said. At a national industry association in Tampa, Fla., in early January, Andrews debuted his latest business, TowCo Mobile Solutions. The company says its TowCo Manager service handles billing, fleet management with customized service intervals and fuel logging with cost and consumption, among other things – to other marine-rescue companies. •

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