VIMS User Guide

VIMS — the Vetting and Inspection Management System — is a web application for planning, carrying out, and tracking vessel inspections. It keeps your inspections, observations, vessels, and the people and companies involved in one place, from the moment an inspection is planned through to the day it is closed.

This guide walks through every menu and page you will use. If you are new, start with Getting Started.

What you can do with VIMS

• Plan inspections and view them on a calendar or a planning board.
• Carry out an inspection against a structured template and record observations.
• Track each observation from open to closed, with risk ratings and follow-up comments.
• Keep a vessel master and record vessel rejections.
• Build reusable inspection models (the question templates inspections are based on).
• Manage the supporting data: entities (companies), users, inspectors, and shared master tables.
• Generate inspection reports as PDF or Word.

The inspection lifecycle

An inspection moves through four stages. The current stage controls what can be edited and who acts next:

Draft → Under Review → Reviewed → Closed

• Draft — the inspection is being carried out and its observations recorded.
• Under Review — the inspection has been submitted for a technical review.
• Reviewed — the review is complete.
• Closed — the inspection is finalised. An inspection cannot be closed while it still has open observations.

Each observation has its own simpler cycle — Open until it is rectified and then Closed — and carries a risk rating of Low, Medium, or High.

What you see depends on your role

VIMS is role-based. The menus and actions available to you are controlled by the permissions assigned to your role, so two people may see different items in the sidebar. If a menu or button described in this guide is missing for you, your role most likely does not include that permission — contact your administrator if you believe you need access.

Note

This guide documents the standard user-facing areas of VIMS. System-administration tools intended for developers are not covered here.

How this guide is organised

Section	Covers
Getting Started	Signing in, resetting your password, and finding your way around the screen.
Dashboard	The landing page shown after you sign in.
Inspection Management	Inspections, calendar, planning, observations, and the task scheduler.
Vessel Management	The vessel master and vessel rejections.
Administration	Inspection models, entities, users, inspectors, master tables, and the email log.
Common Features	Attachments, comments, tags, filters, and audit logs that work the same way across pages.
Glossary	Definitions of key terms and abbreviations.