Shearwater uses Havian to manage their global fleet of seismic vessels

In this conversation I talk with Bjørn Henriksen, a Global Operations Manager at Shearwater. He tells me about Shearwater's use of our software to manage their global fleet of more than 15 vessels.

Shearwater Bly seismic vessel

What is your role at Shearwater?

My role is as one of two Global Operations Managers here at Shearwater, covering the Eastern Hemisphere and also parts of Africa and Europe. I am responsible for keeping track of the overall picture of operations day to day.

Tell me about your background and when you first started using MultiSeis? 

My background is of course, from offshore. I was a Party Manager for many years and I’d been offshore for 18 years before moving into shoreside operations, where I’ve been for the last 11 years now. It was at about the same time that we decided to adopt MultiSeis as the project management tool, so I've been familiar with it as a shore-side tool for the last 11 years. 

Why was MultiSeis adopted 11 years ago? 

Many years ago, one of Shearwater’s legacy companies was looking for a good tool to replace a lot of the spreadsheets that they were using at the time. After a couple of demos from Dave Boulton, it was decided to give MultiSeis a go, and we've continued from there.

How is Shearwater using MultiSeis today? 

On the vessel, the Party Manager and his assistant are using the Project Manager software. The Party Manager logs all the production figures and timing, and his assistant logs HSE, all the meetings, accidents and incidents. Then from this database, they can generate various reports, including one for our clients. We use the same format for every client, unless they have specific requirements. This feature is very flexible now, and it really gets down to the nitty gritty details, minute by minute summaries, and a lot of production details in tables. We have received lots of positive comments from clients about the format of the daily report. Of course, all this information get’s uploaded to the Global Manager. More than 200 people have access to Global Manager, every role from the CEO to the supervisors, and we have never had to run any course on how to use the Global Manager! A lot of these are receiving the daily summary by email, which is a nice feature. It’s an automated log per vessel, which grabs parts of the daily report from each vessel. It doesn't have any graphs, details or anything other than the timing, but it gives everyone in the company a very quick overview, which is not always easy to do. That's the beauty of this. Also, our HSE Department is using it to generate all of their stats. They use the API to interface with our own HSE system. And then probably the most important part for management is the financial module within Global Manager, which we started using about 3 years ago. It's set up as an independent check to the revenue figures the financial department is creating. I set up rules based on the contract and then MultiSeis applies this to the logged production. Every Monday, I report the revenue for the whole fleet to management using MultiSeis. We can restrict which users have access to this financial information by setting their role, so there are only two other users who can access this financial information in our company.

What’s next for Shearwater’s use of MultiSeis?

It’s really important to us that we want to implement things in MultiSeis to prevent double logging, to make our systems better, and easier for our crews. Recently, we’ve been working with MultiSeis to develop the high risk activities log. The idea is to track individual crew member’s competences, by logging when any member of our crews performs specific activities. This is really important, as when we are applying for a job the client will ask what is the crew experience of doing this job. We need to document that a specific crew member has experience with for example 4D, shallow water, undershoot or small boat sorties, and we’re planning to move this process into MultiSeis very shortly. We also want to start using the new KPI features in Global Manager, to monitor operational and HSE KPIs for each project so the crews and onshore organisation can monitor each vessel's performance live.