Herman Groot Beumer: a ship-shaped future

Herman Groot Beumer of Netherlands-based motion compensated access systems specialist Barge Master, is sure “that the future of offshore construction will be ship-shaped”. However, there are a few hurdles to overcome first.

He sees simple practicality at the heart of the matter: “In ten years time I believe these offshore construction and deployment vessels will all be motion compensated, I simply don’t believe we will be trying to put down feet onto the seabed anymore.” He added jackup barges are expensive and time consuming to move around – and he pointed out the industry is generally moving into deeper waters which is leading “inevitably” to more interest in floating facilities, whether these are production plants or ‘Walk to Work’ vessels such as KNVST ship-of-the-year ‘Kroonborg’.

However, while he is excited by the potential of the technology, he’s also a realist when it comes to the present economics: “At the moment offshore wind is still searching for the way forward... while specialist vessels will eventually sweep the board, crossovers from the oil and gas industry are offering charter rates at a third of what they were.” This glut “will drive consolidation” he said, but he is confident that what will rise from the ashes, once the underlying trends reassert themselves, will be leaner, more fit for purpose, highly specialised “and motion compensated”.

Although Mr Groot Beumer is fairly new into his CCO role at Barge Master, he’s been around industry – both marine and landside - long enough to get a feel for the future and has an interesting track record working with companies as diverse as CompositeWorks Shipyard, Boer & Croon, Schlumberger and Damen.

He’s also one of those individuals with a knack for making sense of complicated procedures: he described it as “the red-thread” running through his career. So although his mechanical engineering degree is still useful, these days people are more interested in his ability to streamline processes and show the value of technical solutions to the market.

It’s a knack of increasing importance to the industry: complex construction work calls for far more than just a scaling up of what took place before, “where it’s likely the teams just said to each other, you do this bit, I’ll do this and we’ll come back to discuss it in a week”.

The issue is that “a naval support vessel for example could be built in several different pieces, at three different yards”. He added: “The price of getting the sequence wrong – and it can go wrong – could cost you as much as 20% of the total build... on a €250m project that comes to a lot of money.”

Further, while managers need to have an overview on the process, “the old-school hierarchy simply won’t work, things are now far too complicated”. Besides which, everyone has access to information, they have the internet, “and probably have a point of view”. So, the best idea “is to direct, but leave people enough freedom to work out how they are going to accomplish their goals”, he said. “People need to feel they can take responsibility and have influence over how tasks are performed.”