editorial
Ever thought about a job change? Can you imagine swapping the warm comfort of a hair salon with a scissors in one hand, comb in the other, for a very different set of blades, revolving 80 metres above terra firma on a blustery hillside? Revolve, but which way? We meet the married couple who made the decision that lead to all wind turbines turning clockwise globally. It was all down to a twist of fate in 1978. Never thought of a job change? Per Mazur signed on as a Maersk cadet at the age of 17, now forty years on he still serves the seven pointed star. He talks about his first day.
Then there’s the one job that would terrify most of us. Imagine the scenario. On a flight the stewardess announces ‘does anyone here know how to land a 767?’ You flash through your mind, that you are a competent driver and quite good at X-Box, so you press the button. Psychologist Frank Lamberg Nielsen got the chance to bring a 767 down safely on a trip to Gatwick. Very safely, he was doing a study of how the aviation industry uses simulators, when he took over the controls of a £35 million Boeing 767 mock-up and landed it smoothly.
This is the first eSea of 2017 and perhaps at a watershed. We have so many great tales from training at the industries we revolve around that we intend to make the issues smaller, but run them more frequently – you won’t have to stand at the bus stop of information too long in the future. The new frequency also coincides with our new website; all-in-all an expansion of communication that we hope will contribute towards a better reading experience.
Richard Lightbody rli039@maersktraining.com
Taking Off Safely Landing Safer Hamburgefintsiv
In the cockpit there is skill, not fear, communication, not confusion. So how do they do it? People skills chief instructor Morten Kaiser and psychologist Frank Lamberg Nielsen flew to Gatwick to see a pilot and first officer being put through their paces – a bi-annual skill check upon which the aviators’ jobs relied. 4
The early images of men falling out of the sky, wrapped up in confused bundles of string wood and canvas and severely injuring themselves were perhaps the catalyst for creating an ultra-safe industry that flies along a perceived precipice of danger. If you have a fear of flying, statistics say your thoughts of possible injury and death are far removed from reality. You are 25,000 times safer in a plane than travelling by car.
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viation from its blood-speck- led pioneering days has set the highest of benchmarks for safety. The industry quickly realised that the only way is up when you want to get down safely. In eSea26 we saw how the recurren ce of accidents in the early days became the stimulus for training – crew resources managed to create efficient processes and continuous safety awareness. The simulator grew out of this persistent pursuit for perfection, alongside the war-
time battle for survival for fledgling fighter pilots. Maersk Training has been at the forefront for the adoption of simulators to ensure a more fulfilling and all-round educational programme in its three core industries, maritime, wind turbine and oil and gas. But what more can be learnt from the fly guys? Despite being revered for its achievements, the aviation industry is in no way complacent, in no way happy to stand as number one on the safety platform and say ‘look at me’. But that is precisely what Morten and Frank wanted to do. They wanted to be in the ‘jump seats’ to observe what exactly is extracted from the four hour session the two aviators were put through in the Boeing 767 simulator. ON THE LINE The careers of Commander Ib Jakobsen and First Officer Sune Groennebaek were on the line and over a short period they would face several ‘bad days at the of-
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Taking Off Safely – Landing Safer
fice.’ There would be a number of take-offs and number of landings. With simulator training the two actions don’t have to correspond. On four occasions, at a critical moment, an engine would fail; each pilot in turn would have to react and get the plane safely back on ground. Ib pointed out that the simulator was actually tougher to fly that the real thing. In both cases a safe landing was the principal aim, but all the time Claus Valeur, Head of Training for Star Air, was looking for more from the exercise. Evaluating not just how they did it, but how they went about it, the degree of competence and quality of communication. This story is not about Ib and Sune so let’s say right away that they did well and flew past the pass mark – a pass mark that with Star Air is set higher than that required by the Danish Civil Aviation Authority. ‘On a bad day,’ explained Claus, ‘you can have a dip in one part of the test, maybe there is something else going on in your life. We
Frank (left) and Morten (foreground) in the jump seats taking note and notes set the mark high so that that dip is still above the required level.’ The day-long session also involves briefings and open discussions about all aspects of aviation and working for an airline like Star Air – they are a part of the Maersk group, fly the company’s executive jet and have twelve 767’s which operate on a longterm lease with UPS. Their routes are regular with the main hub Cologne.
For the purpose of the simulator exercise the departure point was Bergamo in Italy’s Po Valley, an important airport and one that gives any crew something to think about, especially if you keep losing one engine. North east of Milan, it has the Alps immediately to the north and suffers from frequent fog. NEW ROLE OF THE IPAD Briefed and ready Ib and Sune,
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stepped up for the session and swopped roles and duties, if not seats. Since there are ten more commanders – they used to be called captains – with Star Air than first officers, scheduling occasionally means that two commanders will sit up front. In that situation they have to fully be able to perform the first officer’s role. Check lists are the backbone of situational management on board – each scenario triggers a different list and approach. One aspect that has changed in recent years is what the officers carry in their briefcases. It used to be masses of documentation and flight plans, today it is an iPad. Clipped into position it is a vital source of information. Standing behind the strappedin officers, Claus performed a number of roles simultaneously – he was in control of the simulator, but also observing every moment from both a technical review and human factors point of view whilst at the same time acting as flight controller responding in-
Taking Off Safely – Landing Safer
Above: First Officer Sune and the vital tool, the iPad Arrow click: Brace yourselves as Frank takes control with one job in mind, getting down safely. stantly to requests with the most detailed of information. It was an impressive performance burying forever the belief that men can’t multitask. What Frank started to see was deeply revealing. ‘If we take the aviation industry as the gold standard, which it is, then I think in ways we, in our People Skills
Department, are trying too hard. What I mean is that we have made or information collection and evaluation too precise, too focused. What I saw with Claus was how he gained a holistic view and through that probably a more accurate overview and picture, yet he did so by keeping the process simple.’ ■ 7
The simulators are aircraft specific and not cheap. A Boeing 767 Freighter costs $185 million, the simulator itself in the region of $30 million. Incidentally the simulators are aircraft specific, when demand for the
plane recedes, they too face being mothballed. That’s not on the radar since Star Air have 60 pilots and 50 first officers, so that means they need 55 exercises, twice a year, 440 hours in the simulator. Then they are just one of 74 of airlines who fly them and although superseded by the 787 Dreamliner, they are still in production. The most produced airliner of all time is the Douglas DC3 – the last one of 16,079 rolled out in 1952, but today a handful are still flying.
Statistics exist to put your chances of death in an accident as 1/491 for a motor vehicle, 1/431,000 on a train and 1/11,000,000 in a plane – ‘they’ calculate that you could statistically fly every day for 123,000 years and be safe. Who ‘they’ are is as questionable as the means of determining the statistical result.
Take the train statistic – the world population currently stands at 7.5 billion, the same number of people who travel in the Tokyo, Seoul and Beijing metro systems each year. Maritime statistics are even harder to calculate. The flagged states keep a pretty tight eye on things but do you calculate Filipino ferries or refugees?
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Tonnes of Training It’s not the biggest in the world, but it is big – in theory it could lift 5,128 Peugeot 208’s, Denmark’s favourite car, in one go. Oleg Strashnov is a massive crane ship with a central job at Race Bank, a 91 turbine wind farm
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currently under construction off the east coast of England. It is about to embark on a particularly heavy lift, placing an all-important transformer in the middle of the 62 square kilometer farm.
he crane ship has dynamic positioning to keep it in situ, but it was decided early on in planning that because of the sheer size of the job that it ought to be anchored. The North Sea is 27 metres deep at the placement point, the comparative shallowness being a
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factor in the potential shortness of ‘working windows’ – the smallest climatic change can quickly alter wave patterns and every minute counts in an operation of such magnitude. The slicker the operation, the greater the chance of avoiding weather-triggered delays.
Tonnes of Training
$£ICKNESS Slickness is down to practice and mutual understanding and that is why the team from the crane company, Seaways Heavy Lifting and Maersk Supply Service, along with a representative of the controlling company, Dong, came together before the operation. They were not on location 70 kilometers offshore from Grimsby, but in a simulator complex some 650 kms east north east of where they would carry out the maneuver. The cost effectiveness of the two days they spent together in MOSAIC, Maersk Training’s simulator complex, can never be fully calculated until the job is done. Even then the value of creating a working understanding will not be fully appreciated until reflecting in the joy of hindsight. Tonny Moeller Operations Manager at Maersk Training in Svendborg sees the cooperative preparation of a precise operation as a next big step in training. ‘We’ve done it with Maersk Drilling who’ve brought crews here to walk through complex drilling sit-
The crossfertilization of ideas and techniques works whether it is in oil and gas or wind turbines.
uations, most notably the world’s deepest, off the coast of Uruguay. We take the tabletop discussion and expand it into controllable reality.’ In another situation semi-sub Maersk Discoverer practiced a precise drill in Svendborg to achieve the longest well ever drilled in the Mediterranean. They did it for real in 79% of the estimated time – a saving of 62 days. TODAY FOR TOMORROW The exercise with Seaways Heavy Lifting and Maersk Supply Service covered one specific operational situation in a six-month contract, more specifically the anchor handling in order to keep the mono-hulled Oleg Strashnov in position. What is becoming increasingly clear is that energy is energy and cooperation, cooperation and that the cross-fertilization of ideas and techniques works whether it is in oil and gas or wind turbines. The training process has developed where Training Today = Tomorrow’s Triumph. The players and
from a crane ship and they already know and appreciate what each other does,’ says Tonny. ‘Normally the relationship would be professional, but cold and artificial at either end of a radio and on day one of the actual job.’ Many people have claimed to have said it, but the most likely first utterance was from the late golfing great, Gary Player who was totally committed to perfecting his game. ‘The harder I practice, the luckier I get.’ * It could be tag line for training and safety and efficiency. ■ *Gary Player explained the origin. ’I was practicing in a bunker down in Texas
the programmes change, but one common result comes through time and time again. It is the opening of eyes between departments, cultures and companies and the immediate growth in understanding and respect for the roles of others. ‘There’s no other place were, on day two, the captain and chief officer of a supply vessel will sit down to breakfast with the team 9
and this good old boy with a big hat stopped to watch. The first shot he saw me hit went in the hole. He said, "You got 50 bucks if you knock the next one in." I holed the next one. Then he says, "You got $100 if you hole the next one." In it went for three in a row. As he peeled off the bills he said, "Boy, I've never seen anyone so lucky in my life." And I shot back, "Well, the harder I practice, the luckier I get.”’
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The ‘Opposite’ Way
The world is split into twos, many defining groups of Yin and Yang. There are those who like Nikons and those who like Canons, those allow ed to eat bacon and those who aren’t, those who love polenta and those who don’t, those who drive on the left and those who drive on the right. Personal preference, cultural boundaries, taste and legal requirements put us into one box or the other. Then there’s wind turbines, you love or you hate them, to some they are a pleasure, to others a blight on the horizon. One thing you cannot disagree about is the way they rotate. Have you ever noticed that they all rotate clockwise? Have you ever wondered why?
Photo courtesy of LM Wind Power 12
The ‘Opposite’ Way
Dateline: early 1978 Location: a kitchen table in a farmhouse just outside Viborg
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rik Grove-Nielsen had just landed the first contract for the world’s first 5m fiberglass blades. Four sets to be built for a small cooperative of far-sighted Jutlanders who, like Erik, believed that if there were to be a future in capturing the power of the wind, it would not be with steel or wooden blades. Across the kitchen table sat Erik’s wife Tove and the conversation wandered towards the molds he was just about to make. Should they go, this way, or that? Counter or clockwise?
THE HISTORICAL MOMENT Erik’s brother Johannes was a central character of the turbine crew at Tvind. Tove thought for a moment and said ‘let them rotate the opposite way of “Johanne’s” blades.’ – the rest, as we say, was history. Nearly 40 years on, the GroveNielsen’s live in a farm at Vile in northern Jutland and Erik can be found most working days in his Fiber laboratory at home. He’s with Siemens now, one of the major players in the industry and the modern day equivalent of the Bonus company, who along with Vestas, Nordtank and Enercon were his first customers. It was these early customers who cre-
Now Tove has been described by Erik as an individualist; she had ‘issues’ with the New Age commune at Tvind in West Jutland, who saw themselves as the leading green redeemers of the world. As a young car and house owning family, the Grove-Nielsen’s were perceived by some commune members as being unable to contribute to the open free-thinking that they believed vital to change planet earth for the greater good. There was air of resentment that stirred more than the prototype blades of the pioneering turbines at Tvind – blades that conformed to the Dutch and Danish windmill tradition of rotating counter-clockwise.
ated the uniformity that is now global clockwise movement. They wanted Erik’s blades, they turned clockwise and the world wanted uniformity and followed that kitchen table decision. It’s been a long and hard road for the Grove-Nielsen’s, scant reward for half a century of dedication and innovation that could be compared to what the jet engine did for aviation. The monster 88+ metre blades of today all go back to a farm at Sparkær where Erik and his assistant Christian ironically sought a cleaner future for us all in a badly ventilated barn. The conditions were so bad that even today Erik is reticent to talk about it.
Left to right: The first set of Økær blades, May 1978. 2. Conflicting futures, in the foreground Økær blades in transit, in the background a Swedish Nuclear Power Station. 3. Early transportation was basic. 4. Manhandling the ‘big’ 7.5 meter blades. Photos courtesy of Erik Grove-Nielsen 13
Photos courtesy of LM Wind Power
THE REAL HEROES The early days were difficult, the world had yet to waken up to the
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virtues of wind generated power, banks were slow to offer help, if any, and potential buyers were
restricted to enlightened school teachers and farmers. ‘They were the real heroes,’ says Erik, ‘they 14
put their money out to buy untested and untried technology.’ It was a hand to mouth existence and on
The ‘Opposite’ Way
one occasion the company only survived because a grant arrived unexpectedly in the post. When the money didn’t roll in the problems rolled up. In 1980 a Vestas order for 7.5m blades for their 55 kW turbines was met, but the blades had a design fault and Erik was committed to replace them, free of charge. The whole company and the jobs of fourteen people hung in the balance. The electricity company pulled the plug and the order was only met thanks to a diesel generator, pumping out exhaust fumes in the backyard so that the molding of a new era of clean energy could proceed. The embryonic blade industry only survived at this point because another industry was in decline. Coronet Boats in Slagelse had an empty order book for their fiberglass hulls and lay-offs were in prospect. A license to produce Erik’s blades was a savior for both parties and within a few years they were employing 400 people.
Left to right: 1. Erik in 1978 and the turning point in the story. 2. The old production line. 3. Bigger blades and a slightly bigger lorry, but one with a crane. Photos courtesy of Erik Grove-Nielsen BASKING IN THE SUN The early days were spent mastering the process of creating the blades with the best possible materials. Blades have a shelf life, at first it was through to be twenty years, but Erik talks affectionately of one of the first, a Bonus generator set up in 1980 in Thy on Denmark’s northwest coast. Today 37 years on it’s still working in the sun of Bari, in southern Italy. ‘It is all original, except the electrics which were upgraded,’ says Erik with a mixture of pride and emotion. Fate played a hand in the very early days of Erik’s lifelong in-
volvement with blades. In 1957 a Belgian Air Force Fighter Jet crash landed in the field beside his rural home, coming to a halt just 35 metres from the kitchen window. His love affair with blades had begun – at the age of seven Erik and his brothers and sister had the whole plane to themselves for a week before they the Belgians recovered it. As a teenager he built model air planes, ordering The Theory of Wing Sections from Dover Publications in New York, when his classmates were buying comics. At college he joined the gilder club and learn to fly. 15
TOUGH TIMES Now 67, a humble man, he replied to the question of whether he was an inventor or designer, that he was ‘neither, I’m an entrepreneur.’ One who admits he hasn’t always got right, ‘I’ve put my family through hard times, it has been tough on them, but we are survivors, my grandparents were pioneer missionaries in Africa and spent their lives struggling for what they thought was right.’ Erik’s name should go down alongside Poul La Cour and Johannes Juul as pioneers and more. The huge contribution that Denmark makes today to the wind industry and the huge contribution that the industry gives Denmark is very much down to the five metre blade created in a Jutland barn. If they could find it, the kitchen table should be centerpiece in a museum, a symbol of where history turned. ■
Scissorhands goes from two blades to three
Highlights to High Heights It was not the most obvious, nor the easiest of career changes. Michael Anderson sums it up in one word, ‘ massive’.
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t took him two years to crack the system, two years of rejection and disappointment, mostly triggered by a somewhat chau vinistic and totally blinkered view of who ‘fitted in’ in his new chosen industry. In the macho world of wind turbine engineers, it appeared there wasn’t a space for him largely because of the job he’d left behind. ‘I’ll never forget that first day on the course; there were lads who went before me to introduce themselves. They had been in the army or were electricians, plumb ers, joiners and I’m thinking OMG, here’s me a blooming hairdresser,’ says thirty-year-old Michael.
“I like getting out of my comfort zone, that’s what keeps me going, that’s what drives me forward.“
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Highlights to High Heights
“They reacted with giggles and asked “hairdresser? Why are you here?” ‘They reacted with giggles and asked “hairdresser? Why are you here?” and that gave me all the incentive just to prove them wrong. It got to the point where I thought, so what, what have they got that I haven’t, that we are all equal.’ TOUGH JOURNEY Michael had been cutting hair, styling and managing salons for nine years when the bug got to him that he wanted to do something completely different. ‘One of my friends recommended the Maersk Training Diploma and I went to the Open Day and it has
“On my first day I installed a turbine and worked solidly for 15 hours and it was just absolutely amazing from start to finish seeing all the little bits of the puzzle come together.”
just spiralled from there. But it hasn’t been an easy journey whatsoever.’ Time and time again his name would go forward and time and time again it would bounce back; the underlying prejudice being that hands that controlled scissors couldn’t possibly control spanners and nuts and bolts. Each kick back spurred him on. ‘I took a step back and thought how can I get into this industry? I did my homework and researched the companies and looked to see what they were wanting. They just saw me as a hairdresser so I went and got onto a course for PEO, Performing Engineering Operations, NVQ1 &2.’* He then got his hands dirty and worked in confined spaces for a local drainage specialist and, with a restyled CV, he again targeted firms. It worked. He landed a one-year contract with the Danish-based specialist recruitment firm FairWind.
wet day with the wind howling standing 120 metres up in the air, miss being in a cozy salon chatting. ‘No, I like getting out of my comfort zone, that’s what keeps me going, that’s what drives me
TOTALLY HUMBLED Looking back did he ever, on a cold 17
forward. On my first day I install ed a turbine and worked solidly for 15 hours and it was just absolutely amazing from start to finish seeing all the little bits of the puzzle come together.’ ‘When I was up top for the first time climbing in as the blade came round I stopped, looked and thought “is this actually happening?” – it was quite a humbling moment after trying for two years.’ If you are tenacious enough you’ve also got to be patient, take the disappointments and knockbacks on the chin – I had many of them. When we spoke with Michael he was home in Blythe waiting on a visa to go to Istanbul on a three month contract – he has yet to gain the offshore qualifications, so it’s currently still land sites he works on – but the determined former hairdresser already knows he can deal with the waves. ■
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Pinned to the Mast In June 1977... Apple launched their first personal computer, it had 4KB of Ram, an audio cassette for loading programs and two external floppy disks for storage. Elvis Presley sang in Indianapolis, the last performance of his career. James Earl Ray, assassin of Martin Luther King, escapes from a Tennessee jail and remains on the run for three days. A 18 year old boy from northern Copenhagen got on a passenger plane for the first time. 18
Pinned to the Mast
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e’s been out with Luna and Caroline and Marie and Laura. In fact twice with Laura. He’s also been with Arthur and Thomas, Jesper and Arnold, along with Laust and Lars. Throughout it all he has remained loyal to one. It sounds like a riddle, but it is not, it is a career. There is one missing word from the above list. Mærsk follows each of the names to identify them as vessels. In fact to complete a unique picture there are a further two missing names, Per Mazur. In truth the ships are only the first chapter in a story of remarkable loyalty, devotion to duty and the ability to maintain a fresh eye. Per recently moved into his 41st year of service with the same company, the one with a sevenpointed white star. In a world where we and our companies are all a lot more fickle and uncertain, remaining four decades with the same paymaster is a genuine milestone. A considerable achievement. Since day one Per’s been pinned to the mast.
There was no generic reason why Per should have chosen the sea as a career; he didn’t live in a coastal town, more importantly at the age of 19, ten years after its release, he still hadn’t seen the most influential Danish maritime movie of all time, SS Martha. It’s a film which is held in high affection by Per who has seen every aspect of it in real life. Martha is an warm portrayal of malpractice, incompetence and above all resourcefulness, set in an age of safety innocence. An age long gone. What it never comes close to is the aspect that has dominated Per’s career, training. Spreading knowledge accounts for 25 working years. To put his career into a relevant timeline, when Per started as a cadet in 1977, he was on his first APM ship when the blowout occurred on Maersk Explorer, the event which triggered the start of Maersk Training. DEAR HR MØLLER There is one little-known episode in Per’s working life that could 19
Pinned to the Mast
have crept into the script of Martha, had they ever had one. Like most of the movie, it is something that could never happen today. The training centre in Svendborg had started up in a collection of portable huts and the demand had outgrown the resource. Per’s frustration at the lack of progress with the ploy to wait until the right moment to ask, resulted in him by-passing the local manage ment and writing directly to Maersk McKinney Møller. I think it is fair to say that Per received a lot of flak another his bent lines of communication. It is also fair to note that two years later Maersk Training Centre moved to Rantzausminde. He still has a copy of the letter, but the fact that Per doesn’t put any significance whatsoever in the occurrence is pleasingly one of the values Hr Møller embraced, humbleness. Constant Care was another value. Nothing to do with the letter, two months later he was interviewed for the nautical publication, Navigatør. His boss, perhaps a little worried about
“I’ve always seen work and free time in the same light.”
his secret to one company longe vity. Changes, challenges and keeping fresh. Being in the right place at the right time also helps. Hr Møller had expressed a wish to have more people ‘with salt in their veins’ working in the offices and Per was one of those ideally suited. He puts his time behind a desk as an assistant manager and a broker as the most stressful and demanding of his 40 years. Another aspect that he attributes to his daily freshness at the prospect of going to work is getting the balance right. ‘I’ve always seen work and free time in the same light, that they are best in complimenting each other not competing.’ The desire he had as a 18-yearold to travel when he got on a passenger plane for the first time to fly to meet his first ship in New York still exists. Forty years on, where possible and at his own expense, he bolts on a few days to try and understand another part of the world. It is an approach which is mutually beneficial. He firmly believes, the ability to em-
Per’s independence streak, had stressed to him the importance of getting the company name across and correctly, the English Centre not the Danish/American Center. He got his message home, the journalist got it right, but when the article appeared the accompanying photograph of him standing at the main entrance showed that the official sign was wrong and had been for some time! RIGHT PLACE – RIGHT TIME Per’s 40 years fall into three uneven categories. At sea, in the office, training. The transition between them has been what he sees as 20
bed yourself into another culture has rewards when communicating on a training platform. SCARED SILLY In the autumn and winter there is a bit of a division. The two principal areas where work and play don’t mix. Firstly he is one of the trio of directors for something that has become an integral part of the region’s calendar, the Horror Nights – an after dark extravaganza where people pay good money for the pleasure of being scared silly. Once the mummies have been put to bed, to test himself his other passion is skiing. Per sees plenty of tests ahead. ‘I can’t understand people who say they are looking forward to retiring in a couple of years to do absolutely nothing. You have got to have challenges and where better to get them than in a lively workplace.’ ■
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MTS/TMS
An initial success with future potential.
If you were to run a startup travel company and you organised almost eleven thousand ‘holidays’ every year without any major complaints from the clients, you could have every reason to be pleased.
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t’s the sort of project which is delivered regularly by Maersk Training Services except that the ‘holidays’ were a little more complex than just transport and other arrangements. The Transocean Training Management Services project was a global effort
between all the Maersk Training Centres and MTS organisation in Chennai which during the first year of its operations in 2015 organised training for almost 11,500 participants. The TMS project which took over all the worldwide training 21
needs for Transocean two years ago itself was a start-up. However, the new company Maersk Training Services in Chennai wasn’t so much a start-up but more as a spin-off from the training organisation in Chennai, India.
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MTS Managing Director Krishna Hublikar looks back on the two years, ‘Creating TMS for Transocean was one of the biggest projects – the scope and the geography was much bigger than anything else. The main takeaway from this project was as long as you have worked out what the customer wants and you have built a system and process around to deliver it and we just follow these processes, it is not that difficult.’ EXPRESS DELIVERY It was a steep learning curve, the time from signing the contract to being up and running was weeks. ‘We knew what the client wanted, but this was a global commitment with a combination of eight centres. It took a couple of ‘bumpy’ months before we felt comfortable. We were lucky that we had strong support from number of Transocean employees and Maersk Training Group to smooth the way to build the knowledge and expertise to deliver on the project.’
Hard working and equally colourful, the Chennai team’s group photograph. Working out of India has its own pluses and minuses. On the negative side is the sometimes challenged internet system and then also what nature can throw at you. The first you can help ease with a backup system, but the second is less controllable. Just as the project was getting up and running Chennai was hit by the worst rainfall and flooding in 100 years. But the commitment from
all the employees in MTS ensured that the service delivery continued without any interruption. MANAGING EXPECTATIONS On the plus side is the global clock. With most of the main Maersk Training centres west of them, MTS can pick up tasks at the end of their days and have them sorted by the time people return to their desks. Apart from 22
the six persons handling the TMS team, MTS also provides support with Picasso booking system, Finance, HR and Group IT tasks to Maersk Training Group entities. The whole secret is down to expectation management. ‘The one thing that is very different is the culture in which the western world operates and the culture in which India operates, but if you can understand this and the expectations, then I think people can deal with it,’ says Krishna. The TMS solution is very flexible and can be easily remodelled based on specific training needs for other clients. With the standardized system and processes there is huge potential for the clients to consolidate their end to end training activities and reap the benefits of efficient services, cost savings, economies of scale and ability to convert their fixed training cost into variable cost. TMS solution can help the clients to focus on their core business and gain real return on investment on their human capital. ■
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He was turning heads, people taking a double glance at his smart purchase. Yes, he cut a dash.
plight since only one person in 33,000 looks at everything in black and white. The rest who have the defective gene, see life in three different colour hues, determined by the prime colours, red, blue and green. It is a life sentence served over-whelming by men, mostly Caucasian, with one blue-eyed Scandinavian in eight affected. Selling odd shoes in Copenhagen is easy.
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here’s nothing quite like the feeling you get from wearing new shoes. It’s like your image and standing have been upgraded, your feet no longer in economy, travelling First Class. It was only when he got home that the moment was shattered. ‘THOMAS! THEY’RE DIFFERENT COLOURS!’ He looked down, they were smart and seemed OK. But then they would to him; deuteranopia has him living permanently in a world of restricted variation, of little colour. For him the sand coloured left shoe was as murky brown as his right. They were a pair, separated at birth, one confined to darkness in a storeroom box, the other put on show to the passing world, blasted and lightened by a season’s sun. Colour blindness is an illfitting description for Thomas’s
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JOB LOT – NOT! Globally eight men in a hundred, one woman in two hundred, don’t have the full paintbox. What it does to them is to restrict not just the arts but severely cut down on the number of employment opportunities. Being a pilot, an electrician, a painter, a police officer, fireman, graphic designer are as much out of the question as being a racing driver. In the maritime world seafarers undergo what is called the Ishihara Test. Sonamed for the Japanese professor who came up with it in 1917.
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Along with brown shoes Thomas has difficulty with red green or orange ones, a bit of a bummer at traffic lights. In Romania, Singapore and Turkey he wouldn’t be allowed in the driver’s seat. Colour blindness’s first recorded disaster goes back to a rail crash in Lagerlunda in Sweden in 1875. Nine people died through a confused signal between the station master and driver. The investigation placed the blame at the driver’s apparent inability to differentiate between colours. He went home and put his pink and green Swedish flag at half-mast. Your digital camera is technically colour blind. It is the three chips inside it that each select a hue. So why can’t technology do it for humans – it can. Thanks to a glass scientist called Donald McPherson, people living in a reduced tone world are able to see properly for the first time. It’s worth four minutes of your time on YouTube.
What must be strange is the effect when taking them off – mightn’t that just depress the user? They have sold 30,000 pairs of the EnChroma glasses, but for 20% of sufferers even these don’t correct the problem. The good news is that they are working on contact lenses – watch this space.
ness, customer blindness. Not the form where no matter how much you try to catch their attention, behind the bar or on the sales floor, they ignore you – that’s not an affliction, that’s a trained skill. Customer blindness is where the salesperson really can’t be bothered and will sell you anything to get you out the door. Husqvarna Part #418363 baffled the guy in the inappropriately
CLOSED There is another kind of blind-
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named Service Department. A fortnight later, from a store somewhere in Europe a part arrived – clearly not the right part, different shape and size were the immediate giveaways, but I was assured that it was the right part, that I just had to replace more of the lawnmower than I thought. I tried and returned, but I was sent back home to try again. Confronted eventually by photographic evidence that he was wrong, he muttered from behind his screen saying that the lawnmower was discontinued right part was impossible to find. He’d charged me 460dkk for the wrong part and since I’d now lost the receipt he couldn’t refund me. Back home I looked up #418363 on eBay. Seventy kroner, and it arrives Wednesday. The blindness is that soon you won’t be able to see the shop and that the salesman can’t see this. ■
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