Company Magazine for the Odfjell Group - March 2005

Owners and Managers
Safety and Quality Meeting in Singapore
By Atle Knutsen
On March 10th, Odfjell arranged a oneday
session on safety and quality for
owners and their ship managers
having vessels on T/C to Odfjell
Seachem and Odfjell Asia. The meeting
was held in Odfjell’s Singapore office,
and more than 20 people from 14 companies
participated.
The objective of these annual meetings
is to communicate our requirements
when it comes to safety, review events,
share experiences and to strengthen
the commitment to safe and quality
operations. To underline our objectives,
we had the pleasure of having Simon
Greaves, Division Operations Manager
of Orica Australia talk about Health
Safety and Environment from a customer’s
perspective.
From our headquarters, we had presentations
by Jan A. Hammer, SVP Odfjell
Seachem, Jan Didrik Lorentz, SVP
The attentive audience.
Odfjell Ship Management and Torfin
Eide, Project Manager Odfjell Seachem.
One of the main topics of this year's
seminar was to inform about the latest
edition of our Risk and Guidelines
Manual (RGM), developed to ensure a
high standard of operations within the
Odfjell group with environmental protection,
operational safety and cargo
handling as the main components.
Spot Chartering Procedures
By Morten Nystad
In January 2005 Odfjell Seachem launched
updated procedures and systems
for the fixing of spot cargoes. These
procedures do not bring any major
change to our way of operating, as
they reflect what our chartering personnel
have been doing for years.
However, given Odfjell's quality drive,
it is important to ensure that we have
a common way of handling the
hundreds of transportation requests
received daily. The various processes of
evaluating, offering, and eventually
fixing a cargo will therefore be
uniform, regardless of who is working
the cargo or which tradelane the lifting
falls under. The procedure will reduce
chances of making mistakes, our customers
will easier recognize and familiarize
themselves with our standards and
presentations, and it will ensure proper
training of our staff.
We already have procedures and standards
for most of our professional
tasks. What is unique with this new
process is that everything is easily and
readily available in the system, only 3-4
Chartering personnel at Odfjell Seachem, such as here at the South America desk,
are applying the new spot chartering procedures.
clicks away, and clearly described in as
few words as possible. There is no 100-
page binder. Process chart, helpdesk
and toolbox, offer templates, clauses,
guidelines and links to other helpful
sites are all on the screen. Most groundbreaking
is perhaps the Post Fixture
Digest (PFD), a short comment from the
responsible broker explaining the rationale
behind fixing that particular
cargo.
The Spot Chartering Procedure comes
as the Company is working to revise
and globally uniform its Quality
Systems. Odfjell Seachem's Spot
Chartering Procedure has been a pilot,
the first of several revised Odfjell procedures.
Already in April, similar procedures
will be introduced for the handling
of longer-term business (CoAs),
operational practises as well as timechartering
engagements
ODFJELL Quarterly March 2005 27