PSC Deficiencies and Root-Cause Analysis

Overview

When a vessel undergoes a Port State Control (PSC) inspection, SeaSquad gives you a structured place to record the inspection, its findings, and — for each finding — a proper root-cause analysis (RCA). The goal is to move beyond a flat list of deficiencies toward understanding why issues happen and whether the fixes you put in place actually work.

Recording an inspection and its findings

A PSC inspection record captures the vessel, the inspecting authority and region, the port and country, the inspection date, and whether the vessel was detained. Findings can be entered manually or extracted automatically from an uploaded inspection report.

Each finding records:

• The deficiency code and the action-taken code (for example, "rectify before departure" or "detained")
• The deficiency description exactly as written in the report
• Where in the source document it came from
• A confidence flag when the finding was extracted automatically, and a marker for whether a person has reviewed and confirmed it

An inspection moves through a clear status as it's worked: extracted, pending review, drafted, complete, and ready for export. If automatic extraction fails on a document, it can be retried.

Structured root-cause analysis

Rather than a free-text box, each finding's RCA is broken into four distinct parts:

• Immediate cause — what directly caused the deficiency
• Root cause — the underlying reason it happened
• Immediate corrective action — what was done to resolve it right away
• Preventive action — what changes to stop it recurring

Each section holds a list of discrete points rather than one long paragraph, which keeps the analysis specific and makes it easier to compare across findings later.

The AI assistant can draft these sections for you based on the finding's exact wording and your fleet's history with similar issues — but it only fills in sections that are still empty, so it never overwrites analysis a person has already written. If a similar deficiency happened before and the preventive action taken back then didn't stop it recurring, the assistant is specifically instructed to propose something genuinely different rather than restating what already failed.

Recurrence across your fleet

SeaSquad automatically checks a new finding against your fleet's history, matching both by deficiency code and by similarity in the finding's wording. For a finding with a match, you can see:

• How many times it's occurred on this vessel and across the fleet
• How each prior occurrence matched (same code, or similar wording)
• The most recent preventive action taken for a similar issue, and whether it recurred afterward
• Suggested wording for the RCA sections, with a reference back to the earlier finding it's drawn from

There's also a fleet-wide recurrence view, grouped by deficiency category (for example, fire safety or life-saving appliances), showing total occurrences, how many vessels are affected, and whether an issue came back even after an RCA had already been filed for it.

Querying via the AI assistant

You can ask the AI assistant about your PSC inspections and findings directly in chat — for example, filtering by vessel, deficiency category, or status. As with reports, results are always scoped to the vessels you have access to.