OSM and Ocean Technologies Group form a strategic partnership to provide operational enablement across fleet, crew and learning management
PRESS RELEASE | 6th of April 2022
To further strengthen its long-term digital strategy, leading ship manager OSM has entered into a strategic partnership with Ocean Technologies Group (OTG). This will see OSM implement OTG’s full suite of software solutions serving their fleet, crew and learning management requirements.
Over a year ago, OSM embarked on a project to review the market and identify the best way forward for its crewing IT strategy. This involved an extensive benchmarking exercise in which almost 30 off-the-shelf systems were evaluated against a strategy of continuing with the development of OSM’s inhouse crewing software, eCrew.
For years, eCrew has been considered as one of the industry’s leading crewing software platforms. However, with recent developments in the market, the speed of change in digitisation and a growing trend for more integrated solutions, a change in IT strategy was needed. This led OSM to review its future IT platforms and prompted an evaluation of Ocean Technologies Group’s digital software applications.
OTG’s Non-Executive Chairman Peter Ryan (left) and OSM’s Chief Executive Officer Finn Amund Norbye signing the contract.
Ocean Technologies Group offers a suite of best-in-class software solutions that will be fully integrated to serve OSM’s entire operations. In return, OSM will bring significant industry knowledge and experience that will help to enhance and improve OTG’s solutions even further.
“We believe this will put us at the forefront of the industry. With this change, OSM will be able to focus on our core, which is technical and crew management and thereby improve our customer and vessel performance. Furthermore, it is an investment in our people at sea and ashore which will provide them with much smarter and more efficient tools to help them in their day-to-day work. Finally, it will help us achieve more transparent operations through better leveraging of data,” said OSM’s Chief Executive Officer Finn Amund Norbye.
This shift in strategy means that OSM will greatly simplify their IT setup by reducing the number of software systems. The PMS system “TM Master” will continue to be the fleet management solution to service their technical operations, “Ocean Learning Platform” will be implemented to power the group’s learning and assessment needs giving OSM access to OTG’s Seagull, Videotel, Marlins and MTS training brands. But the decision to replace their in-house crewing system with the market leading COMPAS SaaS crew management system, represents the biggest transition for OSM.
OSM believe that this transition will represent a significant improvement both internally and for their customers who will experience an integrated solution. Information and data will flow seamlessly and allow customers to easily integrate with their platforms improving collaboration even further.
The system will enable operations on the vessel to be fully integrated with the OSM offices through a unified cloud based platform.
Furthermore, a customer portal will allow OSM’s customers to do their own analysis and take an active part in operational processes if needed reducing manual processes and duplicated effort.
With their slogan “It’s All About People”, it was crucial for OSM that their employees would benefit from this smarter approach to technology. Speaking about the deal Finn Amund Norbye continues,
“With the new solutions from Ocean Technologies Group, our seafarers will receive more up to date tools and enjoy a fully digital experience. Seafarers will be provided with a self-service platform where booking a course, participating in remote training, planning and analysing performance and updating personal information can be done from anywhere on any device.”
“We believe this will greatly improve our operations through an improved quality of service, a more cost-efficient operations, much better tools and technologies for our people and not least vastly improved data analytics to better inform our decision making. We are in an age in which greater transparency and governance is more important than ever before and with ESG and decarbonisation on the horizon we feel this will set us apart as a quality operator.”
For OTG this represents a major milestone in that a leading customer has opted to utlilise their entire suite of applications. Chief Executive Manish Singh commented:
“Forward thinking ship managers are looking to leverage the best available technologies that will enable their seafarers and shore-based personnel. We are delighted that OSM has chosen us as their enterprise solutions partner. We are deeply honoured that such a progressive ship manager has shown this confidence in our solutions and we look forward to helping them optimise the performance of their fleet and workforce in the years ahead.”
From left OSM’s Maritime Group President & Chief Commercial Officer Tommy Olofsen, OTG’s Chief Revenue Officer Johan Gustafsson, OTG’s Non-Executive Chairman Peter Ryan, OSM’s Chief Executive Officer Finn Amund Norbye and OTG’s Chief Creative Officer Raal Harris.
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