SMD's strategic priorities and activities for 2019

In order to meet the expectations laid down in the Odfjell Compass 2.0 strategy, Ship Management Department’s (SMD) Section Leaders have identified and formalized our strategic priorities for 2019 and onwards. These priorities are the basis for a number of activities that will be planned and implemented throughout the year.

The priorities were made against the backdrop of Odfjell’s situation and experiences over the last years: 

• Making everyone understand that we do not compromise on safety is obvious: We must do everything in our power to avoid incidents and accidents.
• We need to have sustainable cost structures.
• Our vetting performance must be very good; otherwise, we will struggle.
• Good leadership and positive attitudes are also of paramount importance.
• Digitalization of our decision-making and modernization of our Safety Management Systems – our procedures and processes – will be vital.

Ship Management has eight priorities for 2019:
 

1. Safety and safety culture. We will foster a world-class safety culture and always abide by our number one guiding principle: We do not compromise on safety.
    

2. Avoiding incidents and accidents. We will not allow another 2018 to happen. We will work proactively to ensure that no personnel injuries, pollution, or accidents will occur within the Odfjell fleet.
    

3. Digitalization and use of Business Intelligence tools. We will employ technology and use data to make better decisions based on objective facts.
    
4. Good leadership. We will continue developing leadership skills and attitudes among our Shipboard Management Teams.
    
5. Sustainable costs. We will aim to deliver world-class quality at competitive costs.
    
6. Efficient dry-dockings. We shall conduct efficient dry-dockings at sustainable costs with better collection of data for analysis and knowledge sharing.
    
7. Good vetting performance. Vetting is our ticket to trade. The trend of our vetting results in 2018 has caused concerns, and we have attended to this through workshops at the Officers’ conferences. We are optimistic that by bringing the lessons we have learned from the past year, we will improve our vetting performance this year.
    
8. Efficient processes and procedures. We will see to it that our procedures are simplified, well-defined, and process-related.
    

Implementation

After having identified the priorities, we worked our way down the list – priority by priority – to identify what each priority will mean in concrete actions. Through good discussions, brainstorming and common sense, we landed on quite a few actions.

Each Section Leader is responsible for selected actions and we will follow up the progress tightly.

I assume and hope that most of you within or with interfaces to SMD (both ashore and at sea) will notice positive effects of the actions along with the implementation.

We will establish systems for measuring the effects of the actions before we consider them “completed” and fully implemented.

As an illustration, below is a brief snippet from our Task List Portal into which we enter practically any task we are working on. The Task List provides valuable support to those responsible for follow-up to keep track on progress, due dates and reporting. Our strategy discussions were tagged Compass 2.0 with subcategories Safety, Quality, and Sustainable Cost.

We hope that our strategy process and the implementation phase will help us move forward in a positive direction. This is not a static process, so please let us know if you have any suggestions to priorities and/or activities that we should consider incorporating into the existing list, or that should be considered for future updates.

As always (at sea and ashore): We do not compromise on safety.
 

Geirmund Drivenes
Global Head of Ship Management