Thank you for joining us. I'm Hart Energy's editorial director, Jordan Blum, and I will be your host for today's webinar, How E and Ps Are Increasing Efficiency by Better Balancing Compliance, Competency and Cash. Today, I'm excited to introduce you to our two speakers, Paal Odegaard, Head of Crewing at Yinson Productions, and Francis Xavier Barciak, Customer Success Manager at Kahuna Workforce Solutions. Now, Paal and Francis, the floor is yours. I'd love to dive right in if we could. One of the the main things I wanted to hear your perspective on is, you know, when we think about competency, compliance, and cash, talk me through how that is all connected when we're thinking about your space and business. So where does that lie, and and how do you balance that against some varying objectives? In our business, it's vital with compliance. It's it's one of our biggest fear is, of course, any severe accidents happen happening with the on our units offshore units, which and to prevent this, we have a lot of requirements put off on us as a company, which, of course, cascades down to each and everyone working on our units. So it's basically a safety measure for us to to make sure that we comply with all the requirements because they're in place to to ensure everyone's safety that we can run a safe and secure operation, preventing accidents or, by by lack of skill sets, competence, knowledge, etcetera. So we're sort of regulated by a lot of external parties as well as our internal quality control of of competence. And so that for us, it's one of our key things to control is actually our competence, and and it's also our license to operate because we won't be given new projects if we have a sloppy attitude on these things. Then then we will have accidents, and and clients will shy away from us. So for us, it's also, of course, good business sense to to make sure that we have competent crew, competent personnel that is is operating our units. And and so in the bigger picture, competence is very much linked to cash because if we're not able to do this correctly, we will very soon find ourselves without any projects. And of course, if the ongoing operations is stopped because of lack of competence, is a huge hit for us. So for our sake, this managing, our competence, crew, all the trainings, all the certificates, all requirements we, have on our shoulders is vital for us to succeed in the market. You brought up a real a lot of good topics that are there, and I can easily see the interconnectivity, especially as we work with all of our clients in the in the space. Right? Because it's almost you know, if you're not running a tight ship or you're not running a tight process, it's not gonna give you the opportunities in the future, which is ultimately going to impact the business in general. But in addition to it, it's the risk, as you mentioned too. There's lives at stake. There's regulatory compliance. There's a a number of things that to consider just in in running a safe operation. But I think the part I wanna pull on a little bit is, like, how do you balance one of the things that I hear a lot with my customers is how do you balance the skills you need today with the skills you need tomorrow? Right? Like, when we're thinking about the energy space is changing, it's evolving, it's growing. So how do you find that balance in knowing what do we need to do to make sure that we're keeping a tight ship, but also looking forward to the future? Like, how do you manage that today? This is where we, found ourselves a few years ago. How do we manage this competence? How do we manage and be ready for what is coming? We five years ago, we were a small company in our industry, running "simple" operations, where we had our operations. And then suddenly, we found ourselves in a situation where we were going into much more, advanced and sophisticated units with a lot of new equipment, a lot of new machines, technology, all so we had to start thinking differently in how we manage our competence. And and this is where we then started investigating how can we who can we work with to to do this better and, and ended up with Kahuna because it gives us the ability to look forward, to see five years ahead. Okay. We we're going into this project, and, this project requires new equipment, new technology, and how do we prepare for that? And that's how we then start building our competence matrixes where we then, analyze what does our crew need to know to be able to operate this equipment and technology. So we start fairly early with identifying these things, and then based on that, every person on board will have a list of requirements that they will need to be trained, certified in, and obtained so that they can continue, this development. And to run this operation, it's, never still. We run something today, five years from now, there's new technology, there's new ways of doing maintenance, monitoring, digitalization, all of these things. And, for us, we we are not able to do these things if we don't have the right tool that we we can put these requirements into a system and then have it come down to us again, sort of closing the loop as a requirement, which, and any requirements require training, competence, certificates. So so that's how we manage to, stay on top of what is coming. But it's we we don't take it lightly. We don't just do it by chance. It's a process we start early and try to be in front of all the time. But, of course, it's not a major shift. It's not totally new, so it's small incremental steps that gets us, to a new place. But, even so, it's the certification and the requirements that is, necessary for us to manage this. There's a lot of moving parts for sure. Like, going back a little bit, you know, in the conversation where you had mentioned, it was simple, where you had a simple process that was there from before. Now it's expanded. I think there's a I'd love to expand there when we're thinking about the impact of how many areas this touches. Right? It's the resources of managing the competency program overall. How do you find that balance of making sure to reduce variation, implement standardization, and then just really think about efficiencies is because there's a lot of competencies that are required in this space. How do you find the right ones, and how do you do you manage that down to a tight process? Well, this is a game where we're very much governed by our externals who come in to audit us all the time. So we are managed or we're yeah. We need to comply with a lot of different regulation sets out there, everything from to to our clients' requirements to the flag states' requirements to the port state require requirements to classification requirements. So all of these external bodies come in and give us a a direction where we need to go. And if we wanna follow this quality assurance set or that quality assurance set, we we are sort of, bound to to do one of them. And, depending on which one, it comes with requirements no matter what how we, turn ourselves, on these things. But so we need to comply with a lot of these external requirements coming our way. And for us, it was we saw that we were we had a system that was never going to be able to manage this, as we saw the complexity grew all all the time. There was more and more, and we need to keep track of revalidation, recertification when they expire. Anything new. It had to be a flexible system that could easily be tweaked so that we could add or remove if necessary. If we had new positions, they, you know, had to be easily put into the system without manning up a lot of people doing this. Right. So this is was all in our sort of equation when looking for a system that could deal with all of these things because it's very easy, you end up with a huge Excel spreadsheet, which is outdated the second you, you finish it. So Yeah. We had to find a better way, and and this is, how we ended up, going to to Kahuna. And we hired one person that championed, the the implementation of, of Kahuna. And he was vital, absolutely. So we had to have one person, but we would have needed that person anyway. So, it wasn't really we didn't blow up our, accruing organization just to be able to implement a new system. We had one guy that really took this on his shoulders and pulled us through it. And now it is a system that we expect or train most of our people in the crewing organization to sit using on a daily basis. But also, of course, a system that we, in time, slowly by slowly, will, implement with each and every crew member where they then will take ownership of their own educational compliance competency journey where they will go into the system every time they think competence, every time they think training. They go into the system. They see their own status. They can see when things are They can prepare for when they need to retrain, recertify if there's new requirements, have they completed everything they should. This is this is of course, it takes time to to get there, but but that's the ultimate goal where we want to do that. And Kahuna has the compliance side where we need to tick off everything that we have today, the requirements we have today, but also the development side where if you, as a crew member, want to develop into the next level position, next higher level position, then you will you can also go in there and start looking at, where am I compared to the requirements for the next level. What do I need to work on? Where do I need to develop? What certification do I need, etcetera, etcetera? So we managed to grow, and take on this task without really hiring much more people than we would have had, anyway. So but it's only possible for us because we have what we think is a top notch system now that can, can help us in every step of the way. We think so too on the Kahuna side for sure. You know, I I wanted to to expand on another area, and it was really exciting as you mentioned it. It's not only meeting the assurance, the develop or the assurance and clients portion. Right? It's development for the future. I'm seeing this all the time, and this is across industries, but I'm seeing it also pretty heavily in the energy vertical where we're thinking about transitions and we're thinking about generations that are coming into play. There's people thinking about what do I need to be able to get to in order to get to that next step? Where do I grow in my career? How do I, you know, take another journey? How do I follow that path? And getting the transparency to see what's needed. So kinda this question goes back to cash and compliance too is, you know, you're investing in your team members, you're investing in your employees, but what are the struggles that you're facing right now when you're thinking about compliance development and investment in the team? It's it's it's very it can be costly when you're when you lose those that you've invested in. Absolutely, and that is the nature of our game. We we operate in places where they don't necessarily have a bunch of qualified personnel. So, for us, it's the only way to get them to the level where we can safely say they can operate our units safe and efficient. We need to take that on our own shoulders and start training and and developing our crew. And, yes, there will always be a risk that once they train, someone else will come along and pick them up. But, you know, that's the risk we need to run with because the alternative is far worse. If we don't train our people, what what sort of crew will we have? What competence will they have? So for us, it's not really a question. We we want to develop our our people and and and crew, and we want to develop, our local crew because we operate in Africa. We operate, places where the the educational system is not necessarily, built to to deal with all the requirements we have. So we need to invest in our people. And and, of course, investing in in our people is also probably the best retention tool we have that when they see we invest in them, they put in the efforts. We give them opportunity to grow with the company, to be promoted, to earn more money, etcetera, etcetera. That is the best retention tool we have. And then, yes, there will be some few that will always be tempted to go somewhere else, have an international opportunity or whatever, but then then we wish them godspeed and and welcome back when if that time comes. So I think, that there's really no option for us not to train and invest in people. But, of course, the the requirements are so many can be that this is a lengthy and a it's a big investment and a time consuming journey. But once we see that we have qualified personnel, it's it gives a much better confidence for the whole operation, and that's why we also have record high uptime on our units in the industry that because we we see that we rely on people, until there's unmanned FPSOs around the world. We we rely on people, and they will always need to be trained and developed. So and that gives motivation, and that gives a better atmosphere on board and everything. So we see only good things with with this. I love the the emphasis as you had mentioned. It's it's local talent as well. Right? Finding those that are aware in the space we operate within business, and that's extremely important and impactful overall. There's another variance I wanted to explore a little bit. I hear a lot of the differences between skills and competencies when we're thinking about offshore versus onshore. Right? How do you manage through those, or what are some of the key differences that you see in this space, and and how does that factor into the way that you build your programs? I think, the huge difference between the onshore personnel and the offshore personnel is, of course, that, our offshore crew has so many requirements, compliance requirements that we need to tick off, which you won't find onshore normally in our industry. It's more engineering. It's more support office, personnel, which also, of course, need to be competent, but it's not the same level of complexity as we had, or we have with the offshore crew. So for me, it's, given that for our company who started with the offshore crew, as long as the way we do it now can deal with the complexity offshore, I am hundred percent sure it would be able to deal with the onshore requirements that we have, which is far few, a lot less and and more simple than than the ones we have offshore. So for me, we've been talking about expanding the use of Kahuna to the onshore crowd as well, in our company. We are a project driven organization. So for the projects, it would also be a super tool to be able to identify the competence you have within the company. So you could put together, tailor made your your dream team based on the existing competence in the company. If you miss someone who needs whatever competence, you can find it. If everyone is registered, you can pull that person into the, project, which might fly under the radar if you don't have a tool like this where you wouldn't be able to really utilize existing competence in the company. So for me, onshore, offshore, yes, it's more complex with the offshore team, but the the tool, Kahuna itself, would for sure be able to deal with the the onshore part as well. So, that's a given from from my point of view. Appreciate that. And there's a lot of of factors to consider in it. You you'd mentioned the fact that if you're in a project based as a company, and I wanted to unpack that a little bit more when we're thinking about the metrics and the requirements and the criteria that you have to to meet. Because, not only meeting the needs of within the employee base and within the team members onshore and offshore, going back to some of the metrics and the requirements you have to to meet, for example, like the ESG criteria, what are some of the key metrics that you find you're you're consistently revisiting and going back to when you think about compliance, competency, and just overall demonstrating assurance within the space when you're thinking about projects that are upcoming? What how how do you how do you measure the impact of Kahuna, I guess, is one of the flat out question. It's not always easy to see the direct impact at once, but the thing for us is always how do we manage to, run the safest possible operation. That's that's basically what it is. Lost time injury, fatal accidents, etcetera, etcetera. The typical HSEQ metrics is is the very visible numbers where you can read, do we run a safe operation or not? The same with the how well you run the the uptime of the of the units is also another one that will be very give high impact on on the business. All of these things are you can tell if you have a competent crew or not. And, of course, again, if you have, a way of developing and promoting internal candidates for positions that become open, it's another way of seeing this. So there are quite a few things that you can look at, but one of the more easy ways for us is also the, the audits. We have audit auditors coming in right, left, and center. It could be the client. It could be the class. It can be anyone. There are there are regulators in in every one of these countries. It's the navy. It's a lot of externals coming in constantly auditing how our performance and how we live, the quality, assurance we have. And and when we get through these audits again and again and again with no findings on the competence, on the certification, on the compliance of all these regulations. It tells me and us as a company that we have a system that works. And we five years ago, we didn't have this system, so we were always worried when we had an audit. Will they ask us a question? Will we be able to present the proof? Will we have the certificates readily available? Will we be able to go into the system, find what they're asking for? Can we show them that we have control of this whole competence area. Now that it's no longer a worry for us because we have proven again and again and again that this is what we can do with with Kahuna, with the system we have now. So we we go through these audits now, walk in the park for us. So that gives peace of mind from for me, of course, but everyone else as well that, the we're not suddenly being, taken by surprise that, oh, we have a guy that has no valid certification or stuff like that. This is history. This is, no longer the case for us. So it gives very good assurance that we can trust our company and processes. Is it safe to say the risk associated if you couldn't produce that evidence or you you got put into a situation where, you know, you've got asked a question that you couldn't respond to, it's huge. Right? I mean, that's the whole trickle down effect. If you weren't able to, that can can impact business today, but that can also impact business tomorrow. Right? I mean Absolutely. I can't even imagine how how significant those, that could be from a cost perspective. We're really one major accident away from severe, business damage. So it's, it's proven again and again in our industry that one big fatal accident can really make too much damage to recover from. So for us, this is, as I mentioned in the beginning, this is really licensed to operate, our licensed to operate. If we don't run a safe and secure operation, we will very soon be, in a very tight spot. So one thing is the ongoing of our operations, of course, if we had loss of life and then, of course, all those consequences. But as you say, the future clients, the future projects, we will lose our trust in the the markets, big time. So, for us, this is, top, on the top of our priority list. Love the conversation as we've been exploring. I appreciate the perspective. I'm curious as we're thinking about those listening to it in the the conversation today. What is some advice that you would give to other energy organizations and how to strike that right balance, right, between cash compliance, workforce compliance, or competency? What what advice would you give to others out there today as they're listening to to the conversation? My advice is, like, I can base that on our history, our company history. We had a system based on Excel spreadsheets. We had another system that handles some of the crew, but not all of the crew. It's it's we run operations from Far East to Brazil. So we all over the world. We had to find a system that was easy to use, that would, would be able to implement with our existing HRIS system, pulling data from one to the other, that was flexible, that had all the bells and whistle, with the complexity our industry has. Then that is for me, it's like hire someone or name someone to be the champion and start implementing, start doing putting down the work. It is a lengthy process, but with the support that we received from Kahuna, which I'm sure every other client receives as well, this is you will be handheld through the whole process, and someone will help you and pull you through this whole thing. And and then it's a hundred percent positive experience from our side. We would not be able to have a successful start here in Brazil if we didn't do that two years before. We started we started implementing this the two years before we were supposed to have operation in Brazil. And and if we didn't do that, I don't know where we would have been. That would have been a nightmare. Now everything has been running very smooth and and we're starting and getting through all the various audits and all the tough regulations that we have here in Brazil at least. And yeah. So I can't be enough. I can't thank enough for Kahuna to be there and help us as well, getting there. It wouldn't be possible to do it on our own. That's huge. That means a lot. And I would say thank you on behalf of all of us at Kahuna, and thank you to yourself and all of our clients in the space because we learn through you. Right? It's that partnership and collaboration. It's conversations like this, I mean, to make sure that we're understanding the full impact, the full perspective, and ensuring that you're set up for success across the board. So it's right back at you. Thank you for for these conversations, transparency, and collaboration. Then then I mentioned something I I didn't talk about, and that and that's this flexibility that we've had with Kahuna that as as any IT project, you you bound to face some things that you hope were there or some features that you would like to have and and button here to click or tweak there to fix them. And that has been one of the most positive experience with this implementation process where we can always come back. Listen. We need this one. That would be super if we can have this timestamp, this or button here or whatever. And and it's always like, yes. Super. Let's dig into that and and solve it. And then week two later, it's it's there. So it's it's been a really, really good experience. I love that. And and it's iterative. Right? Because it's not a one size fits all process. Right? There is a a framework that's needed that takes a that covers a majority of the the way, but there are other tweaks. There's other changes. There's other things that you need to be able to account for. And then you mentioned it earlier in the conversation that the iterations along the way, things are always changing. It's not a constant. So how do we account for those changes down the line is is key. Looks like we're starting to get some questions in from the audience. Let's have a first one. What was the adoption process of Kahuna like across your employees at Yinson? That that's really an ongoing process. It's not something we have completed yet. First of all, we had to implement and get every system to talk to each other. We had the, you know, HR system that had to talk to Kahuna, get every person in the crewing team to start using the system, being trained in it. We we have trained the on or offshore management team to dig into Kahuna and have a look and monitor. So the plan for the final adoption process for the other employees is actually to go out on each and every unit, sit with the crew, show them and teach them and train them on how to do this. But this is on the longer term horizon where we want to get to a point where they take full control of their own journey on on in this competence world. But we are not at the stage where this is completed yet. But, our plan is that every single crew member, when they think competence, when they think training, they think Kahuna. That's where I find this. This this is where I go. This is where I can see my development plan. This is where I can see my status today, which one, what are my certificates are expiring, when do I need to redo them, what's on my to do list. So that's the the goal, but we are not finished yet. Alright. Next up, we have from the audience. Does Kahuna talk to other systems like the LMS and HRIS or scheduling? I'll take that one. The answer yes. We do consider ourselves to be that hub, and through a number of different means of of integrations, we we think it's vital to make sure we're looking at perspectives of HRS, LMS, scheduling, even analytics when we're thinking about how are we measuring, reporting, and showing that impact. All of those pieces that Paal had highlighted today are extremely important from a Kahuna perspective, and I think we need that full picture in order to be able to navigate. Here's another question for you. How did you champion this system at Yinson and push it through to implementation? You know, it's it was based on need, actually. We found ourselves in a very sort of, urgent situation where we had to do something. So that is, of course, a very strong motivation to get something done when you see that if we don't do this, it will be a nightmare for us. So we had a strong motivation to get ready, to be ready at a certain time. We started early enough, not too early, but we we got there in time. We had a very structured cooperation with Kahuna when we started our cooperation. It was weekly meetings or even off more often if needed where we were supported and sort of pulled through the whole process by by Kahuna. And we also had a dedicated resource, as I mentioned before, that we hired who became our training and competent superintendent, who then took this on a on his shoulders and and became the superuser and and, really led the implementation process for us. So all of those things helped us to get to the point where this was successfully implemented. Along the way, we, of course, trained up the other resources who will also use this on a daily basis. We are using agents. Agents have access to this as well to monitor. So the whole point is to spread it out so that more people monitor the the status and the situation so that we are not caught with the anyone missing certificates, etcetera, etcetera. We have several steps where people go through and and people monitoring so that we avoid ending up with the with issues. But a structured way, regular meetings, dedicated resource would be the main things from from my side to point to. Very good. Okay. I have another audience question. How did you engage your operational leaders and help them see the impact of a digitized competency management program? We sit with the we have operations managers for each and every vessel or our units. And, of course, they are as keen as anyone, more keen than anyone to make sure that they have competent crew and run a safe and and good operation efficient and, yeah, profitable operation. And so it wasn't really a hard sell when we approached them and saying that we have this great tool that will support us making life easier for you guys, making sure that you have better uptime, you have better control of all the compliance issues we can prove to local authorities that we develop and train people, which will, again, give us peace of mind. We will have better crew being able to be promoted, take on higher responsibilities, etcetera, etcetera. So this was not really a very hard sell for any of us. The system and the results where you get from, having a tool like Kahuna speaks for itself. So we they they were all and the discussion of implementing and and getting the system was over within, thirty minutes more or less. So, you know, it's it was a fairly easy sell. Next up, how does Yinson anticipate evolving its competency management approach in the future? Well, now that I mentioned, a bit that we've successfully implemented this for the offshore, personnel, we have trying we have advocated, bringing this to the to the rest of the organization where we, want to implement or try to implement this for the, for the onshore people, the office personnel and project based personnel, to expand the use of Kahuna because we again, for, even for those personnel, you would need something to control competencies even if it's not as complex. So expanding it for the wider audience in the company is one. And then, of course, it's the, the development side that I briefly mentioned where we build in on the job training, processes. We will be able to take a fresh from school person, putting him on our units through a structured process ticking off with various assignments, and also checks and balances along the way to finally tick off through an external assessor if the person is competent or not. So that's where we're going now to build that part of the of Kahuna to be ready to take people on that journey. The third thing we'll do is to make sure we implement with more CBT providers, computer based training providers so that we can pull good trainings directly from their systems into our Kahuna so that we can see that there's one place where we control this, but the source of what we do can be with someone else. So but the certificates and and, yeah, trainings can be held by someone else, but, but the proof and and the compliance part is is always with Kahuna. So those are a few things that we see is coming our way and and, what we're currently working on to expand the use of this. Well I think we're fresh out of questions. We're running out of time. That was incredibly informative. Paal and Francis, thank you so much for sharing your valuable insights on how E&Ps can increase efficiency by effectively balancing compliance and competency. Your presentation was really informative and thought provoking. Thank you so much for joining today's Hart Energy webinar featuring Kahuna Workforce Solutions.
