This presentation was held by Alexander Sulzer, MESPAS at the International Marine and Technical Conference organized by Middle East Alumni of Ship Technology MAST in November 2008 in Dubai.

1. Introduction
2. People and Software
3. Conceptual Division of Tasks
4. Technical Marine Asset Management
5. The Life of your Team Player “Software”
6. Your Role as a Manager Implementing Software
7. Optimize Cooperation
8. Leadership Challenge
9. Joint Venture
10. Key Performance Indicators
11. Create Value from IT Strategy
12. Final Statement

Introduction

Good afternoon Ladies and Gentlemen

On behalf of MESPAS we thank Mr. Roy for granting us the opportunity to convey our view on the "the role of software in the maritime and offshore field" to you.

• We begin my presentation by setting the scope:
  1. We will specifically address "management support software", namely the so-called "Fleet Management Software".
  2. We will not talk about the obvious and proven fact that such software can help you run your business more efficiently in a lot of ways. This is trivial and can be observed within almost any industry. What we will debate are the preconditions and aspects for making the use of Fleet Management Software a strategic success.

• Looking at software in the context of the maritime and offshore field, we can distinguish two basic particularities:
  1. In the case of your industry, management support software is not only a competitive factor but in some cases also required by classification societies.
  2. From the perspective of a software service provider like MESPAS, we can identify a specially challenging user group: your off-shore staff. Busy with many traditional complex tasks managing moving and positioned marine assets, they want management support software to work. Period. Their level of tolerance for experimental computer things is very limited.

This second point is crucial, because your dispersed off-shore personnel —besides company management and office staff— plays the key role in collecting information which provides the basis for tactical and sometimes even strategic management decisions. In other words: management software is about managing resources, good management is based on accurate information and a lot of that information is provided by off-shore personnel—so if you help them to use the software, you actually help the software to support your business.

So what stands at the beginning of the successful use of management support software?

People and Software

First of all and generally speaking, people and software are supposed to work together. Efficient cooperation is reached when people and software both do what they are best at. While people are

• creative,
• flexible in reacting to the unforeseen and
• capable of interpreting the unknown and thus are intelligent,

software has the distinctive capabilities of being

• exact,
• tireless and
• extremely fast in carrying out clearly defined tasks.

Conceptual Division of Tasks

In other words: people create software and software must help people - if well designed and correctly used, software will support people by

• carrying out non-creative and repetitive tasks,
• enforce rule-based and standardized workflows and
• avoid and/or correct their mistakes.

Technical Management of Marine Assets

The technical management of marine assets represents one of your industry's most substantial cost centers. Its defined tasks and aspirations are

• efficiency increases,
• cost savings and
• safety improvements.

As we do not doubt that software can help here, how do you ensure that people and software work together in the best way for achieving these goals? In other words: how do we integrate software support with an established system of manual tasks?

The Life of Your Team Player "Software"

For this, we have to understand how software is

• "born",
• "educated",
• "hired",
• productively "used",
• continuously "trained" and
• most importantly turned into a "team player".

Obviously, these expressions deliberately reveal that we shall perceive software just as another of your employees' colleagues. In technical terms we talk of

• software design,
• development and
• implementation on the one hand and
• software use,
• support and
• maintenance on the other.

These six steps can be broken down into

• software implementation and
• software operation.

Any useful operation is based on a successful implementation—so for the sake of this presentation let's focus on that former point.

Your Role as a Manager Hiring Software

Before implementing a management support software, apply some brain work in connection with the status-quo of your technical management of marine assets as well as with your attitude towards using software for that purpose:

1. Are you confident that your well-formalized processes correspond with best practices proven within your industry?
2. If confronted with a fresh and innovative approach, is your top management ready to consider that approach - specially if it includes introducing new proven software concepts? ("we've always done it like that" is not a valid objection, "our legal situation obliges us to keep certain processes unchanged" however is.)
3. Is your workforce well trained and mentally prepared for using software?
4. Are you ready to accept the fact that there can be a trade-off between comfort—meaning to adapt software to people—and quality—meaning sometimes to adapt people to software? And so that there is an optimum to be established here?

Optimize Cooperation

Let me explain this last requirement crucial for any successful implementation:

• Pragmatically, end-users must be comfortable and willing to use a particular software.

At the same time, this requirement—however important it may seem—should not suppress the second very promising aspect:

• For the sake of quality and for benefiting from software's specific capabilities, software must be allowed to play out its strengths which among several consist of the ability of obliging people to follow formal and proven best practices.

Leadership Challenge

Based on the true innovator's creed "don't ask your customers, but rather convince them" this means skillfully leading your personnel on the tightrope walk between

• considering their needs and wishes in order to gain their willingness for the new software while at the same time
• convincing them to accept the new and different aspects in order to let the new software take the entire business to a new level of efficiency and quality.

In view of the strategic importance of implementing management support software, this doesn't mean just managing people—this is true leadership in its purest culture.

Joint Venture

The contemporary best practice for buying and implementing management support software is called "Buy and Build": you buy the software infrastructure as a service and refine it for your purposes. As such, implementing software is always a joint venture between you as the customer and the software company as your corresponding software service provider.

This joint venture consists of manifold challenges but at the end of the day it boils down to three absolutely crucial issues:

1. Know what you want today and spend some time on thinking about what you might want in the future. This avoids the so-called "scope creep", which threatens to inflate implementation projects by customers changing their mind too often and too much after the project has started.
2. Get to know thoroughly and soundly the software service provider's project manager assigned to your case. After all, he's the guy turning your money and effort into efficiency increases, hence cost savings.
3. Insist on "hot" real-time presentations. Do not rely on spectacular powerpoint slides but trust the proof of a live and fully "productive" demonstration. After all: a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

Key Performance Indicators

Such a joint venture needs sophisticated controlling. This means identifying and monitoring key performance indicators which reveal and measure the implementation success. Besides that, these KPIs are what your software service provider is going to use as a reference for implementing your case.

The following diagnoses indicate a successful software implementation:

• Most non-creative tasks are software supported like backup, software updates, synchronization and very importantly data consistency control.
• Most user interactions with the management support software are comprehensively logged so that user activities can be retraced at any time.
• A sophisticated user role model restricts access to data and functionalities to specific users according to company policies.
• The management support software's reporting capabilities are able to summarize the status of critical business aspects at any time automatically.
• Data input methods must foster all critical aspects of data quality: correct, comprehensive, relevant, secure, up-to-date and authentic.
• The software's documentation is comprehensive and supports software operation as well as software training. After all, documentation is—besides the endorsements of existing customers—a software's most important ambassador!
• A successful software implementation follows publicly known and well accepted standards in all aspects.

Create Value from IT Strategy

• After its implementation, software has to clearly and definitely indicate its ROI — both in tangible financial and intangible operational terms with regard to what we stated as distinct strategic goals: efficiency increases, cost savings and safety improvements.

• So, let's consolidate and summarize our thoughts on the role and influence of software in the maritime and offshore field.

1. Perceive software as a special teamplayer
   • Software is not a mere instrument. It can be your "quality-guard" helping you to maintain quality in your business processes by its distinct characteristics: exact, tireless and fast.
2. Develop a readiness to trade comfort for quality
   • Don't just argue that software must always adapt to and fulfill any requirement whatsoever. Recognize the potential quality gain in the fact that people may adapt to some extent to well set up software-supported processes.
3. Create “testable” requirements
   • If you boil down the requirements, make sure they are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant/realistic as well as timely/tangible. Like that they are testable and thus reveal the extent to which they are fulfilled.
4. Strongly consider end-users
   • Ask them what they think but also remind them that the software doesn't simply work for them but with them.
5. Guarantee top management support
   • Implementation success is based on leadership, conceptualized thinking and realistic perspectives—all three being typical top management tasks.
6. Insist on “hot” real-time demonstration
   • As we already said, come up with well thought through use cases that you want to have demonstrated on a live production system. If it's not existing yet and going to be tailor-made for you then ask for sharing the cost with the software service provider.
7. Know your software service provider's project manager assigned to you as their customer.
   • He's not just a supporter, he's your strategic partner and the linking pin between your implementation success and the software service provider you pay money to.

Final Statement

Ladies and Gentlemen, implementing management support software is as challenging as it is reasonable. A lot of it has to do with leadership and systematic and abundant thinking — and although management support software is not everything in your company, it strives to be as nourishing as the set of motivated and skilled employees it's supposed to support.

We thank you for your attention.