7 minute read
Protecting life at sea
BC SERVICE I PROFILE
When disaster strikes at sea and the lives of seafarers hang in the balance, all of a vessel’s emergency equipment must be in perfect working order and ready to go. Lives literally depend on it. BC Service, based in Italy, has a proud decades-long record of ensuring that lifesaving equipment on its clients’ ships is excellently maintained. Andrea Bruzzo, General Manager at BC Service, spoke to Richard Hagan about the business of protecting life at sea.
BC Service (bcserviceinc.com) has a rich history dating as far back as 1942. Originally trading under the name Bianchi & Cecchi as a specialist lifeboat manufacturer based in Genoa, Italy, over the years that followed the company gradually evolved its product-based offering into a service-focused offering that was itself constantly adapted according to client demands on global scale.
Today, BC Service has pivoted away from lifeboat manufacturing and now offers specialised servicing of life-saving appliances (LSAs) and FFE services, through the very recent acquisition of Shipping Safety, on seagoing vessels. The equipment within those categories include things like davits the winches responsible for hoisting and lowering lifeboats the lifeboats themselves, and anything else on board relating to the vessel’s lifesaving and firefighting equipment. BC Service also supplies spare parts for the whole LSA and FFE family of equipment.
Global facilities
The company services client vessels worldwide thanks to its global facilities footprint. Apart from its headquarters in Miami, USA, its six main service facilities are strategically located in Algeciras, Genoa, La Spezia, Rotterdam, Shanghai, and Singapore. In addition, it has multiple local resources scattered around the world.
All seven locations boast all of the machinery and other equipment needed to carry out the company’s full shore-based service offering such as services, testing, overhauls and repair work.
BC SERVICE I PROFILE
Across all of its locations, the company currently employs approximately 150 staff members, the majority of which – around 100 – are specialised, highly qualified service engineers. According to Andrea Bruzzo, BC Service’s General Manager, these are far from your ordinary engineers.
“Our job is highly regulated. We have straightforward requirements from an international regulatory standpoint that govern the people we can employ as service engineers. They must have a mechanical background with two years’ experience and be trained on certain kinds of equipment before they are able to start carrying out inspections.”
In 2021, BC Service launched its brand new, state-of-the-art staff training facility near Genoa. It took six months to build and is a shining feather in the company’s hat.
“This facility is something that not many companies have,” remarked Mr Bruzzo.
Besides being able to train our personnel without relying on anyone else, it’s also a business opportunity because we can offer training services for personnel from other companies.”
The facility exists not only for training or certifying new hires, but also to ensure that BC Services’ engineers are able to practice and continuously hone their skills. After all, lives might literally depend on their ability to do their job properly and thoroughly.
“When we identify an issue, we need to be able to establish how to fix it,” stated Mr Bruzzo. “For that reason, the staff need to be at the top of their game at all times.”
BC Service is an Approved Service Provider according to Resolution 402(96) for hundreds of makes and categories of equipment, covering the majority of the ships and rigs presently in operation globally. Additionally, in 2009 the company received its ISO 9001-2008 (currently upgraded to ISO 9001:2015) and IMO and IACS Members Certifications.
The responsibility of protecting life at sea
“Our daily responsibility as a business is to ensure that the lifesaving equipment onboard a vessel works properly at all times –especially when an emergency happens that requires the crew to abandon the vessel,” Mr Bruzzo emphasised. “When maintenance is carried out correctly, we see LSA and FFE equipment failures occur then, rather than during an emergency when the equipment is needed most. That’s the reason that ongoing and proper maintenance is so critical.”
Potential failure points on LSA and FFE equipment are numerous and they reinforce the criticality of the work that BC Services’ engineers do on a daily basis.
“We see lifeboat release hooks that don’t open, oil on the brake pads of winches, or completely seized brakes that would prevent a lifeboat from safely getting into the water at all,” revealed Mr Bruzzo. “We’ve also seen sheaves that are bent, cutting any rope that goes into it and causing the lifeboat to fall into the water, and cracks in the fibreglass of lifeboats, allowing water in and potentially resulting in catastrophe.”
He added: “The marine environment is very aggressive. Seafarers don’t always know how to operate or maintain LSA and FFE equipment properly at sea, so our main concern is having many eyes on every job to ensure that we’re able to foresee tomorrow’s issues.”
Covid chaos and diversification
The cruise ship industry was especially hard hit during Covid, with the world’s cruise ships sitting idle for most of 2020 and many remaining so during much of 2021. And at the time of writing, the confidence in 2022’s industry is mixed, to say the least.
This has proved challenging for BC Service, for which the cruise industry was its biggest customer. Almost overnight, its main revenue streams dried up.
“We’ve been heavily hit by Covid,” Mr Bruzzo confirmed. “Cruise operators stopped their vessels and carried out only the minimum mandatory inspection activities. Inspections were not a priority because they were just trying to survive the pandemic. There were months where we were wondering if and how we’d survive.”
Fortunately, for a company that has survived the end of World War 2, it was going to take more than a pandemic to put an end to it.
“In early 2021 we managed to stabilise the business despite low revenue. Things are improving now and the challenges of Covid have simply pushed us to embrace new ventures and new opportunities. We learnt that anything can change at a moment’s notice and that diversification is extremely important.”
In keeping with that theme, the company has very recently completed the acquisition of an FFE service provider located in Rotterdam and Algeciras, Shipping Safety (shipping-safety.com).
“The company is significantly expanding its service offering beyond simply servicing and maintaining lifeboat-related LSAs. It places us in the market as a broader safety player outside of our current work scope,” Mr Bruzzo hinted, adding that this new venture goes back to the heart of the company’s ethos of responding and adapting to client demands.
“A year and a half ago in 2020 we were worried about whether we’d survive, but now we’re adding a new chapter to our story,” he smiled.
Reaching out to new horizons
“We sell quality,” Mr Bruzzo emphasised. “It’s a broad and generic term, but to us, it means that we carry out the job properly. Not only according to each customer’s needs but also in line with classification society requirements. It refers to the quality of our suppliers and of course our personnel. So when we say quality, it’s an all-round concept.”
The company has an evaluation tool that is given to customers every time its crews board one of the client’s vessels. Based on just shy of 3,000 evaluations in 2020, BC Service’s engineers scored an 89% customer satisfaction rating. Data for 2021 is still being compiled, but the company’s goal was 91% and Mr Bruzzo said he is confident that this figure will be reached or exceeded.
BC Service has historically been well-connected in the cruise ship industry, boasting established relationships with all of the big fleet owners. With the chaos of Covid now mostly behind us, the company is looking to broaden its market and connect with vessel owners in the oil and gas industry.
“We are leaders in the cruise industry and now we want to reach out to the oil and gas industry to start establishing our services there, too,” Mr Bruzzo concluded.
With full ISO certification and detailed ISO audit trails, highly qualified and constantly retrained engineering personnel, and a global footprint able to respond to customers anywhere in the world, BC Services is ready to take on the most demanding projects wherever they may be needed. n
