Why is transfer planning important?
Marine coordinators make transport plans to provide optimum utilisation of vessel/helicopter capacity and bring personnel back and forth safe and with minimum time used for transport. But reality at sea does not always allow for the plan to be executed without changes. The need for making rapid changes to plans is part of a normal workday for the marine coordinator.
What can you do?
Use planning tools designed for the environment where you need to change plans rapidly, without compromising the safety of the people involved with the plans.
If the planning tools do not have capabilities that support the everyday need for rapid change of plans, there is a risk that planning tools revert to the preference of the individual, e.g. home-grown Excel tools or even pen and paper. If that happens, demands for reliable transport data dictated by HSE policies or business process optimisation teams can no longer be fulfilled.
The marine coordinator is the link between contractors requesting transfers to perform work offshore and vessel captains/helicopter pilots who deliver these transfers. To make these ends connect in an efficient manner, workflows and tools to support workflow must be in place. Part of the workflow should be handling the changes to plans that happen almost every day.
When there is a sudden need for creating a new transport plan and inform all relevant stakeholders, the marine coordinator must be able to accomplish this in a quick and repeatable way that does not entice the coordinator to deviate from the approved workflow.
Workflow and tools could support e.g. the upload of transfer requests received from contractor in pre-formatted Excel files, easy copy/paste of transport plans from previous days and automated check of valid inductions/certificates of personnel assigned to work offshore. No matter how, the key is to help the marine coordinator stick to agreed workflows in due respect of the time pressure they sometimes are faced with.
Improve future offshore operations with wind farm software for
effective marine coordination
The SITE modular software suite provides reliable real-time situational awareness so that decision-makers and coordinators know the exact location and status of people, cargo and vessels at any given time and can track exactly what's going on, in order to make faster, better-informed decisions. Click the modules below to learn more.
