Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement (BSM) believes in treating business partners and employees with fairness, keeping commitments, and thereby maintaining the good reputation of the Schulte Group.

Expressing his thoughts about BSM, Capt Sankalp Shukla, Managing Director – Crew Service Center, Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement (India) Pvt Ltd in tête-à-tête with Capt Kamal Chadha, MD, Marex Media Pvt Ltd.

What the Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement represents?
BSM considers its employees as their biggest asset, so value of the employees are top priority for BSM. With that they build a strong relationship with their customers; where the customers basically trust them completely with their assets and they know that they are being dealt with very fairly. So there is a lot of
focus on transparency with the customer, at the same time we make sure that we build a long term relationship with our customers. This is possible because we have very strong shareholdings and we have got long term perspective with regards to our business.

BSM believes that at any given time the customers assets should be readily available in the best performance manners, whether it be technical or in the commercial. So the focus is focusing on customer base through value addition for employees; that is how we work.

What are the big challenges that are there in the ship managing industry today, particularly the manning sector?
The biggest challenge for any shipping company is to find talented, trained manpower for the future. In Bernhard Schulte we already have 24, what we call the crew service centers that are manpower supplying officers across the globe. We have got 600 ships and more than 20,000 seafarers onboard, so one can imagine the kind of resources that we have invested in trying to get the right type of crew onboard the ship. At the same time, we have got four maritime training centers located globally.

Our focus in on firstly, recruiting the right people and empowering them with the right kind of training that they require. We look at the sectors where we can slowly train the crew or invest in training crew. In 2017, we opened our crew service center in Ghana with the focus on getting crew from west Africa, South Africa, Ethiopia and we also invested in a training center over there. Just recently we have signed Memorandum of Understanding with an Institute in Korea, where we are looking at promoting Korean seafarers.

So it is a long term strategy in regards to crewing because we know going ahead the biggest challenge is going to be getting well trained crew for our ships. Today, the LNG sector or the gas sector is expanding really big, recently we have taken over vessels that are covered under the IGF Code, and that is the future, so we have got LNG Stimulators in our training sector in Cyprus as well as in Cochin. We invest a lot in training, we invest a lot in our seafarers and we invest a lot in recruitment, so long term pain areas is going to be getting the right people and our focus is on trying to mitigate that.

In your experience, what are pitfalls a reputed shipping company should really watch out for and avoid as far as possible?
Shipping companies should be careful about not trying to gain customers by compromising on cost this is a mistake that we see a lot of companies doing that trying to undercut and then not being able to achieve customer satisfaction. Everything comes under cost and if your customer is a good customer, he knows
that, there is a cost aspect that is involved in good management services. Because, whether it be crew management, technical management or commercial management, there is a cost aspect and that should not be comprised, because by cutting cost you are actually under providing and that is something that
the shipping sector needs to actually realize, so this is a big pitfall that we need to make sure that we do not fall when we do that.

Can you please give us few recent milestone of BSM’s Success?
Well, BSM never accepts status quo per se. While we are well established in the maritime sector, in ship management as well as our parent company in ownership of vessels commercial management has been a part that we have always played. These are traditional things we already do, but BSM does not stop there, we want to give the customer the entire flavor of what is to offer in the industry and we developed ERPs. Our sister company Mariapps is a software company and they have developed something known as the PAL module, which is an integrated module which talks to each other. Crewing to connected to payroll and Payroll then there is PMS connected to Purchase then there is a voyage module and all these modules talk to each other. For example, a seafarer signs onboard a ship and the minute the master signs onboard the ship in the back ERP, his wages will start getting calculated automatically.

Similarly, they have something known as live fleet, the customers and ship owners are given web access, where they can click on the vessel and get real time data coming to them about the vessel.

They also have a technical performance, a monitoring center, where you know a lot of big data from vessels are collected and the performance is analyzed. So they have sample vessels, where they analyze the data coming from that vessel compared to the remaining fleet to see what the performance difference is and then ofcourse they use that to improve the performance of the other vessels. There is lot of focus on big data, artificial intelligence, because the sensors gathering these data.

In BSM, there is no dull day, there is always some new innovations taking place, something new offer the customers and value addition to the customers. I think that this is the big achievement from our side is we don’t stop at what we are doing now, we look at the future and what additional services and benefits can we give our customers.

What did BSM do to hold up the morale of your ship?
The main thing, whatever the crisis there may be onboard ships, the most important thing to remember is end of the day the people who are running the ships are the people at the spot and you being rather us being the company, we need to build that confidence in them that the company is standing behind them
that they have the support of the company and the company is there to take care. So even in this case there was constant communication with the vessel, we were speaking to people onboard the ship building confidence that ‘don’t worry BSM is there,’

There were lot of people speculating lots of things but end of the day our seafarers knew that BSM stood strong behind them, they had that confidence in us and we came out of those crises. Main thing is building confidence and our seafarers have that confidence on BSM, that through thick or thin BSM will always stand by them. That confidence was there and that worked right.

What a young man like you has on his plate on a typical day?
My morning starts with nice double expresso which I need to get myself up and working, once I come to work I basically spent the first hour just making sure to take a stock of the situation what has happened overnight, so normally if there is an emergency I get a call at night, if there are no calls that means things are going well. Then I have a meeting with managers and we see the ships that need takeovers, we need to see where their emergency reliefs things like that. I am also the Chairman of FOSMA, so that also during the day takes quite a bit of my time because there are lot of initiatives from first masters especially during this corporate times whether it be running your own organization or an industry representative group like FOSMA, there is a lot happening in the back drop so lot of time goes in that. I really look forward, when it is around 7.38PM, I get to go back home, but that does not stop there, I have calls to attend, unfortunately the emergencies when you are dealing with such large number of crew. It is seven days a week and 365 days in a year, so that is how it is.

In BSM, there is a lot of focus on balancing the work and family life, there are times that my boss reminds me that I need to go on leave and he says you will go on leave and then you need to switch off your phone. Like I said that employee focus is very important for them and these small things make a big difference, so we are very focused on work life balance kind of thing so that works well.

Marex Media