P&O Maritime Logistics head of HSSEW Ian Trebinski* lambasts closed thinking on industry collaboration
Big open source transparent value-adding collaborative projects are already proven in other industries. Where is ours? Why don’t we have this?
Imagine if we could all see which fuel filter manufacturer provided the best bang for our buck. How much would we reduce our waste by not going through cheap fuel filters? Imagine if we could see which lube oil provider had the best life cycle of lube oil provision; how much could we reduce our scope three emissions? What about collaborating and sharing on infrastructure projects within the countries and the ports that we operate on? How quickly can we address the issue of not having power and a shore base. I think the days of holding on to data and trying to work in silos is absolutely behind us.
This year P&O Maritime Logistics will launch a free, open source, web-based platform and you are invited to join in with us. Our current version is displaying our live HSE data, anonymised safety statistics, incident locations, types of injuries and where the injuries occurred. We will soon put up technical data, data related to our machinery conditions breakdowns, manufacturers, OEM data, and the list will go on. We believe that this will help us all, change the industry, share data, share ideas, identify trends, identify efficiencies, and drive sustainability for our benefit and for the industry’s benefit in years to come.
We need to work together. We need to share the lessons on what works, what doesn’t work, what is delivering benefits, what isn’t delivering benefits. We need to drive that culture and attitude down through the supply chain. We’re not just going to accept arguments that ‘this is the way we’ve made engines for the last 50 years’. We want something different. Give us something new. Give us benefits. Give us efficiencies. And work with us on doing that.
What we should be able to see on the open source platform is if we have operator A and operator B, and they’re both using the same engine, and this operator has a fantastic maintenance system, and this operator has a poor maintenance system, but they both have the same problem, then it’s not a maintenance problem; it’s an engine problem. And the more data we have in the platform, the more we have to analyse and the more we can cut, slice and dice, and the more the more value we will be able to get out of it.
From an owner/operator perspective, it’s our data. We pay for the machinery, we pay for the vessels, we pay for the people to operate them safely. It’s our data, let us have it and let everybody in the room have that data because 100 operators sharing data and looking at 100 operators’ worth of pictures is more than one engine manufacturer looking at one engine manufacturer’s worth of data.
The perceived internal hurdles are surmountable. We just need to move forward as an industry and address those issues. Or to quote my 12-year-old daughter: “We just need to get over ourselves.”
*This article is an edited version of fuller remarks delivered by Ian Trebinski at February’s Annual Offshore Support Journal Conference, Awards & Exhibition in London
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