Built company-wide operations system from scratch with zero technical background

SCREENSHOTS & PRESENTATION: attached below

NOTE ON CONFIDENTIALITY: This is a proprietary company operations system. Blue Visby Solutions Ltd is a live commercial entity with active clients including major grain exporters and global shipping companies. URLs to the Airtable system cannot be shared publicly as they contain commercially sensitive voyage data, vessel information, and client details. A live demo can be arranged upon request for verification purposes.

RELEVANT URLS:

Blue Visby Solutions: https://bluevisby.com

ACHIEVEMENTS:

I am the Chief Maritime Officer at Blue Visby Solutions, a UK-registered maritime technology company that optimizes ocean voyages to reduce fuel consumption and emissions. I have zero technical background. I am a Master Mariner who spent his career on ships and in commercial shipping operations.

Before AI Mastery, our entire operations department ran on Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, and manual presentations. Every voyage report, every client update, every data analysis required hours of manual work across scattered files. We regularly spent more than half a working day just preparing reports. Numbers were often inaccurate because data lived in multiple disconnected spreadsheets. Nothing was live. Nothing was accessible on mobile. Nothing was automated.

Three months ago, I introduced Airtable to Blue Visby after learning about it through Vykintas Glodenis' class in the AI Mastery program. I had never heard of Airtable before that class. I then completed Vykintas' dedicated Airtable course as well and supplemented it with YouTube tutorials. I built every base from scratch, learned by doing, and iterated until the systems worked.

What exists today:

Commercial Voyages in Deployment: The most important operational tool in the company. Tracks 30 vessel nominations across 19 vessels with live dashboards showing total fuel saved (424 MT), bunker savings ($223,490 USD), CO2 emissions avoided (1,349 MT), and voyage performance metrics including AER and CII ratings. Filterable by client, operator, voyage type, and status. The entire management team now uses this daily.

Voyage Dashboard: Visual analytics showing voyage distribution by client (CBH Group, GrainCorp), status breakdowns (completed, in progress, ceased), operator distribution charts, head owner groups, P&I clubs, classification societies, port distribution, and vessel location at nomination. All live. All filterable. All accessible on mobile.

Blue GA Statement Tracker: Every completed voyage with date, vessel, BAU vs BV emissions, fuel consumption, savings percentages, AER ratings, and CII results. 19 completed statements visible in one view with automatic calculations and colour-coded ratings.

Vessel Static Data: Complete vessel database with 29 records including photos, IMO numbers, flag state, dimensions, tonnage, classification society, P&I club, and ISM details. Available in both grid view and a visual card interface for quick reference.

Pilot Tracking (Marubeni DTVP): 71 daily reports tracked across multiple vessels with stage classifications, destination ports, DTG calculations, bunker prices, and BAU ETA comparisons. Includes competing vessel tracking with 48 records of queue positions, AIS speeds, and ETAs.

Roster Management App: Complete staff management with planned roster calendar, time logs, monthly work reports, tasks, roster change requests, leave requests, people directory, and public holidays. My team members Vaibhav and Mara now manage their schedules entirely through this system.

The transformation was not limited to Airtable. The Blue Visby team adopted Claude across the company, and I use it extensively for operations, commercial research, email drafting, document creation, and strategic analysis. The development team uses Claude Code for software development. I introduced Gamma for presentation creation, and the team now uses Claude integrated with Gamma for all client presentations. I also use Wispr Flow daily for voice-to-text across all my work.

The real achievement is not the tools. It is that a distributed team across London, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Perth, the Philippines, and India now operates from a single source of truth. Reports that took half a day now take seconds. Data is always live, always accurate, and always in everyone's pocket.

I also set up Airtable AI agents within the system to assist with data-driven decision making, text extraction from images, and complex formula creation. Automated workflows send email notifications when voyage statuses change or when action is required.

Airtable, Gamma, and Wispr Flow were all introduced to Blue Visby by me, a non-technical mariner who learned about them through this program.

TOOLS:

Airtable (primary tool: 8+ bases, interfaces, dashboards, automations, AI agents, forms, mobile app)

Claude AI (used extensively for operations, research, and communications)

Claude Code (used by development team for software development)

Gamma (presentation creation integrated with Claude, introduced by me)

Wispr Flow (voice-to-text for daily workflow)

Figma (SOP flowcharts and visual documentation)

METHODOLOGY:

1. Identified the pain point: hours wasted on disconnected Excel spreadsheets with inaccurate data and no real-time visibility.

2. Learned Airtable from scratch through Vykintas' AI Mastery class and dedicated Airtable course, supplemented by YouTube tutorials.

3. Built the first Airtable base myself (Marubeni pilot tracking) to prove the concept before introducing it to the wider team.

4. Expanded to commercial voyages, roster management, and vessel data as the team saw the value.

5. Trained team members to update and maintain the systems independently.

6. Introduced Airtable interfaces for non-technical users who needed dashboards without touching raw data.

7. Set up workflow automations for email notifications and status updates.

8. Integrated AI agents for decision support and data processing.

9. Rolled out mobile access so management could check live stats anywhere.

10. Applied the same "build it, prove it, hand it over" approach to Gamma and other AI tools, while leveraging Claude extensively for my own operations workflows.

LEARNINGS:

1. You do not need to be technical to transform how a team works. You need to be willing to learn, build the first version yourself, and show the value through output rather than theory.

2. The biggest barrier to team AI adoption is not the technology. It is showing people that the new way is genuinely better than what they are used to. I did this by building systems that were immediately useful, not by giving presentations about AI.

3. Airtable is Excel on steroids. That simple reframing helped my team understand what it is and why it matters without any technical jargon.

4. Start with your own department, prove the value, then let it spread. I did not try to convert the whole company at once. I built for my operations team first, and now the entire management team is on it.

5. AI Mastery gave me the vocabulary and confidence to explore tools I would never have considered. Before this program, I did not know what Airtable was. Now it is the operational backbone of a maritime technology company.

ATTACHMENTS:

1. Presentation (PDF) with screenshots of the live Airtable system

2. Two page summary of the project