Yesterday 17 members attended our monthly meeting.
Following a social half hour and lunch, our member Captain Raminder Anand gave a both informative and entertaining talk on his experience with Maersk Line.
Prior to his studying at Victoria University last year and following a seagoing career leading to a Masters Certificate, Raminder was employed by Maersk Line in the development of their electronic systems for the monitoring and management of their vessel and land-side operations.
Maersk is a shipping company active in ocean and inland freight and port operations.
With it’s growth Maersk identified the need to grow a 24/7 real-time system enabling their senior managers to, at any time, oversee what was going on in their logistics chain and capital investments, thereby maximizing efficiency and performance.
Fine detail in the such as supplying their ships Masters with hand held electronic devices which are used to record significant events in a ships minute by minute activity (pilot aboard, first line ashore, shoreside labour aboard etc.etc.) became part of the process.
Such information continues to be part of the ships logbook, the completion of which is required by maritime law. Not unexpectedly this hardware innovation inevitably occasioned push back from ships masters but were accepted as being necessary, that was, after due consultation .
In regional offices a wall sized array of computer linked screens allow close investigation and examination of elemental events in the network and permit improvements to be identified as being necessary.
As Raminder rightly indicated “this is a far cry from the days of tramp-ship operation of vessels moving from port to port awaiting or hoping to pick up a fortuitous cargo”
In thanking Raminder for allowing us an insight into what goes on in the operation of mainstream shipping in the world to-day Eric presented him with a Company tie.
