“Wonder what next challenge will be around the corner with Allseas?”
After a 10 year career in the offshore division of the Smit International group, in November 1990 I joined Allseas as Assistant Project Manager, but after a couple of weeks was promoted to Project Manager on the Ranger Anglia project, a relatively small pipelay and trenching project with Lorelay and Trenchsetter in the Southern North Sea. During the execution of the project in the summer of 1991 I spent some days offshore on both vessels to get familiar with the pipelay and trenching process.
Just after the offshore execution on this project I was appointed as Project Manager for the Agip Tiffany project, the first full EPIC project in which Allseas was responsible for the detailed design of the pipelines and subsea valve structures, procurement of the materials, fabrication of the subsea structures and all related installation works. The pipelines were installed and trenched in the summer of 1992, whereas the installation of the subsea isolation valve structures and connection to the pipelines was performed by a diving subcontractor in the summer of 1993. In that same season I also was working as Project Manager on the installation of pipelines for Phillips in the Ann field.
Later in 1993 I was asked to take the position of Department Head Engineering, responsible for the management of installation engineering, structural engineering and the drawing department. While working in this position in May 1994 I was also appointed as Department Head IT. The IT Department at that moment was in the middle of connecting all the offices and the vessels through a worldwide network, the implementation of e-mail and the migration to Microsoft Windows and Office. After simultaneously acting in both roles for some time I had to abandon the Engineering Department in order to fully concentrate on the IT Department where we were then also implementing the first ERP package throughout the company.
After working very happily in IT, in late 1997 I was invited to set up the Proposals Engineering Department. This department provides the technical input for the proposals that Allseas submits to its potential clients. As head of this department I also at times acted as Proposal Manager and in that role I mainly focused on future projects in Australia and Asia. During these years I made various business trips to Australia, Malaysia and India.
The largest proposal I worked on was for the KG-D6 field development in the Bay of Bengal on the East coast of India. My first contacts with the client, Reliance Industries, started in 2002. Four years later we received the Invitation to Tender for this project and in September 2006 we were awarded the largest project since the start of Allseas in 1985. Following the award of this contract I was transferred from the Proposals Engineering Department and appointed as Senior Project Manager. At the time of writing this testimony in March 2009, the offshore execution of this project nears its completion, with me having spent some 300 days in the site office in Visakhapatnam on the East Coast of India since the start of the offshore operations in September 2007.
I wonder what next challenge will be around the corner with Allseas?