Press Release: EEA Grants fund VesselMan and Ulysses Systems Hellas Collaboration

​Innovation Norway has provided support for Greek company Ulysses Systems Hellas and Norway’s VesselMan to develop an integrated Planned Maintenance System and project management tool for technical projects. This joint project is part of the Greece Business Innovation program.
 
Greece Business Innovation is a program that was established to support access to finance for Greek companies working on projects with partners from the EEA Donor States (Lichtenstein, Iceland and Norway). Following the financial crisis, access to capital has remained one of the major issues for Greek Small and Medium-sized Enterprises. The Program is co-financed by the EEA Grants, part of the EEA and Norway Grants 2014-2021 funding round, as well as VesselMan and Ulysses Systems Hellas. 

The project Connected Maintenance System was officially started 01. June 2020, and was initiated by the CEO of VesselMan, Glenn Edvardsen, and the Founder of Ulysses Systems Hellas, Dimitris Lyras. The project aims to increase value creation and sustainable growth in the Greek business sector. Greek shipowners continue to own and operate the largest merchant marine fleet in the world, with the Greek-owned fleet accounting for 7.6 percent of the world’s fleet in terms of ship numbers, and close to 21 percent of the world’s ship tonnage.
 
“We are very pleased and grateful to have been supported by Innovation Norway and Business Innovation Greece. I have always said that if you’re serious about shipping, you need to be in Greece”, Glenn Edvardsen said.
 
“This is a great opportunity for VesselMan to build a standard integration module with an interoperable API that can work with any PMS system. This will be of great value to ship owners and superintendents, and will allow for seamless integration of multiple solutions delivering a much better outcome than has been previously available.”

VesselMan is a Norwegian provider of software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions to the maritime industry and is represented by agents and offices in multiple locations around the world. The company provides a digital project management tool for technical shipping projects such as drydocking’s. VesselMan is developed in partnership with forward thinking ship-owners in order to reduce cost, time and become more compliant. 
 
Dimitris Lyras, Founder of Ulysses Systems Hellas, emphasizes the importance of collaboration when you have an ambition of being the best in your field.
“Integration is the future of software in all verticals, because no single vendor can please all clients, as proven by the advent of SaaS apps to replace applications in ERP. The world’s software entrepreneurs are not all going to stand still, while a couple of vendors in each vertical market purport to please every member of the client company.”
 
“We also feel privileged to be a part of the Business Innovation Greece Program 2014-2021 operated by Innovation Norway. Norwegian entrepreneurs have had an unquenchable appetite for innovation in the marine industry for centuries. An unstoppable force we hope to combine with the Greek tradition of putting common sense first in the marine world. One of these aspects is to embrace the entrepreneurial drive and the future, which is about integration.”

Ulysses Systems Hellas, a front-runner in software innovation, is the provider of well-tried management solutions for the Maritime Industry since 1996. Its award-winning software, Task Assistant®, enables office and seagoing personnel to work intuitively and efficiently with minimal training and just-in-time information. Managers should expect a fast return on total software lifecycle cost from unique user-centric design and mature process optimization and minimization of information gaps.