Within an industry, which recognises no geological boundaries and where all companies encompass several countries, it may not possible to say a company is Faroese - we will do this anyway. We permit ourselves to call the company, Keel Solution, for a Faroese company. With its head office based in Copenhagen, a development branch in the Ukraine and staff travelling all over the world, the Faroese Mr Christian Didriksen Grahn, Mr Heini Mikkelsen, and Ruben Mikkelsen have developed Keel Solution into a unique supplier of highly specialised solutions to the offshore industry.
Mr Heini Mikkelsen has a history in the oil industry, and Mr Christian D. Grahn has formerly had his own IT consultancy company, supplying SAP solutions. They recognised the requirement for a system, which is capable of collecting all the knowledge accumulated in oil companies. A large global oil company recognised the value of such a system and they wanted it developed immediately.
The Danish company Mærsk is today one of their largest client, but it is Faroese who own the company, which now has a fully developed system with a large sales potential. The company is developing and with an office in Klaksvik, one in Singapore and a training base in Ukraine on the agenda. This month Keel Solution is participating in the large oil exhibition in Stavanger.
All knowledge in one system
Oil company activity is complex and extensive. Therefore, it is very important – not least for efficiency – that all knowledge in the various ventures be utilised in the most effective manner.
-Drilling platforms can use over 60.000 various components in their construction. The people who build the platform are not the same who operate it and on the other side of the world is another similar platform with a completely different set of people, explains the Keel Solution Marketing Director, Mr Dánial Hoydal.
Keel Solution has developed a system, which makes it possible to monitor a component from its initial installation to its grave.
Each component receives its own identity tag, which makes it possible to monitor it from its installation until it is replaced. This means this knowledge does not leave with the staff who originally installed it, but is retained within the system.
-This knowledge exists already, but is very often spread to the various company branches or to the individual staff member, and this is not satisfactory in giant oil companies, says the Marketing Director at Keel Solution.
This Faroese company has also developed a similar system for employee qualifications.
-What often makes staff quit their jobs, is that they feel their capabilities are not being fully utilised, they are not being allowed to exploit their full potential. Very often companies lose staff quite simply because they were not aware of their capabilities, says Mr Hoydal.
The Keel Solution system registers all skills, education and safety courses, enabling the Human Resources division to plan work and fully utilise in-house capability, instead of buying expensive consultants from the outside. All this is important for the oil companies in the future, as there is a huge demand for qualified staff.
Easy-to-use
A traceability system makes work more efficient and gives the oil companies an opportunity to save large amounts of money, but for it to work properly everything must be registered. This does not happen by itself and the problem with the collation of knowledge is very often that the registration method is too complicated for the common user. The Keel Solution system is quite user-friendly. For example, the system contains a blog-system, whereby the individual engineer, who registers a malfunction in a pump on a drilling platform, need not access a difficult database to register this malfunction, but can write the malfunction on a simple blog - something everyone is familiar with.
-The blog is the pocketbook of the employees. Instead of staff writing everything down in a pocketbook, the information is registered in a web-based system and another engineer working on a platform with the same equipment on the other side of the globe, can see that exactly that pump has a malfunction, says Mr Hoydal.
The Keel Solution system is today an integrated part of standards, when new platforms are built. The Faroese Company is in the process of marketing the system to other large companies.
-We are in the rather unique position that nobody else is doing what we are doing. This presents us with several advantages, but the danger is that the market is not familiar with the product. Experience shows however, that if we are presented with the opportunity to explain/demonstrate the system, the interest is large, says the Marketing Director for Keel Solution, Mr Dánial Hoydal.
-Very much is happening in the oil industry at the moment. Oil prices are high and oil companies are interested in increasing effectiveness where at all possible. Therefore the possibilities for a company like Keel Solution are very good, estimates the Keel Solution Marketing Director.
