A global, yet personal touch

In September of 2003, a group of three forward-thinking men at Thales GeoSolutions, a subsidiary of the Thales group, broke away to begin a company that successfully combines a global market reach with a personal touch.

Metocean Services International Pty Limited (MSI)—the brainchild of directors Bruce Spolander, Stefan Stimson and Sidney Bilski, who offer over 40 years of management experience in the offshore oil and gas industry—is based in both South Africa and Australia. Today, MSI has worked in roughly 23 countries worldwide providing a highly specialised range of metocean services.

“We’re a small company and our South African office has seven full-time employees. Our Australian company has two employees,” Bilski says. “We have four, fulltime field engineers who deploy and recover oceanographic equipment. We have a fulltime data processor who process all of the data from the instrument and write reports for the client. The three directors of the company are responsible for the sales and marketing and management of the company.”

Bilski says that in such a small and specialised company, collaborative relationships and partnering on projects, combined with offering personal and high-quality bespoke services, has earned MSI great success during the last seven years.

The MSI focus

MSI’s core business is collecting oceanographic and meteorological data for its clients. “The focus of the oceanographic side is really on currents, waves and water levels and on the metrological side it’s really wind speed, wind direction, air temperature and a bunch of others,” Bilski says.

Other aspects, such as project management, data processing and hosting client data on the company database, also come under this business component and what previously appeared to be highly specific areas of service are suddenly drawn out by these associated activities.

“We also have an arrangement in place with an associated company for forecasting services,” Bilski adds. “Those are the services which we provide on a worldwide basis.”
There are a number of key factors that enable MSI to execute these services successfully. To start, the company’s location in South Africa has provided the perfect springboard for the company to work throughout various locations around the world.

“We’re talking about a South African company rather than what’s happening in South Africa. Those are different because the South African company is working internationally and is based in South Africa,” he explains. “Because we’re based in South Africa, we have relatively no overheads so we’re able to be competitive from a commercial point of view.”

MSI has no multiple offices around the world with associated overheads to carry. Instead a smaller team, perhaps with more personal identity in terms of the individual staff companies encounter, orchestrates this global operation.

“Our second competitive advantage is that we’re a small company and so we offer a very personalised service to our clients,” Bilski says. “We don’t have a huge management structure, so generally what will happen is that at the start if each project the client will be allocated a direct contact within our company and that will be one of our owners. They will be the direct contact throughout the duration of the project and that means they’re there basically 24 hours a day for that client.”

Bilski says that the third significant strength MSI has in its positioning and formation is the quick turnaround time it can offer when responding to clients, compared to larger players who must navigate their way through mountains of procedure and red tape before a decision can be acted out.

“We typically don’t require weeks upon weeks before our data in house will submit a report to the client. That typically can be done within one, two or three weeks,” Bilski explains. “It’s a personalised service with a quick turnaround, the commercial competitiveness because of our location, and also because the three owners of the company are involved of the running of the company we take everything very personally. It’s in our interests as the owners of the company to make sure that the clients are happy.”

The company’s personal touch approach to each project serves to maintain these high standards for project execution and service provision both from MSI and the various companies they collaborate with.

A company culture of collaboration

Bilski explains that collaboration is a central part of MSI’s philosophy and offers the company the chance to focus on those services in metocean data collection which it can provide in-house.

“Often, there could be other services that a client requires, such as weather forecasting, which we don’t do in-house,” he says. “For that we have an agreement with Aerospace and Marine International. Another kind of service which the client might require is engineering design, and for that we work with a local engineering company to provide that service. We also rent equipment from third-party suppliers to supplement our own equipment pool.”

In support of the company’s competitive turnaround time to client projects, MSI has purchased over one million dollars-worth of equipment within the last two years, however Bilski also says that owing to delivery times which can be longer than the time that MSI has to mobilise equipment, the company also hires the necessary pieces from localised third party suppliers.

“We also have agreements in place in various geographical locations because in certain locations throughout the world it is either easier or a legal requirement that the contract is held locally,” he says. “For example, in Norway, we hold the contract between a Norwegian company and our South African company, whereas in Indonesia if we were working there with someone, for example Total, then we have a local company called Pageo (PT Pageo Utama) who would hold the contract with Total and subcontract part of the services to us and that stands for contractual purposes, logistical purposes and for tax purposes.”

The company uses this same means of equipment provision in the United Arab Emirates, and Bilski says that it really depends on the project location and client. MSI is currently involved in various projects, the three largest of which are located in Norway and the United Kingdom. The two projects in Norway are with Statoil, the Norwegian oil major, and OLF, The Norwegian Oil Industry Association.

“The one for Statoil is basically a two-year deepwater current measurement program, and the one for OLF is a one-year shallow water current measurement program, but at nine different locations, so there’s nine sets of equipments on that project,” Bilski says. “The project in the UK is with Chevron and that’s at least one year of current deepwater measurements as well. Those are our three biggest projects that are ongoing at the moment.”

MSI was awarded this contract with Chevron in mid-December 2009, and began installing the necessary project equipment around January 18, 2010. This project exemplifies the location and timing constraints that the company is expertly working under. “We basically had 30 days to procure all of the equipment, ship it to Aberdeen, charter a vessel and basically get it in the water during a very small weather window,” Bilski says.

Going forward MSI seeks work even further afield whilst simultaneously exploring new industries and adding to its client base. “Our idea is to increase the geographical spread of places we’re working,” Bilski says. “The second thing we’d like to do is increase the range of clients we work for. We’re currently working for oil companies, coastal engineers, dredging companies and such, but we know that there are clients we haven’t yet worked for.”

Bilski also says that the company intends to grow further down the line. “The longer term goal is to grow the company to a significant size but we’re very careful about that because we want to do that organically and in-house,” he explains.

“We don’t want to become a huge administrative burdened company. We want to remain a small personalised company but grow within that context.”

It’s a context that MSI has created and honed by continuing to focus on what it does best; those in-house metocean services, whilst effectively seeking partnership which offer local knowledge and footholds to offer expertise, quick project execution and potential for further growth and company development. This is a company built by, and on top of, three people with a strong vision for the best way to deliver the services they have amassed such great experience in. MSI is one company which has proven to be adaptable, personal and leading the way for provision of metocean services to a worldwide market.

www.metoceanservices.com

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