Northern Marine Manning Services… NMMS… has been providing recruitment, crew management and training services for more than 30 years.
It all started in 1983 when Northern Marine was formed to provide technical ship management and crew management services to The Stena Group of Sweden.
But while Northern Marine’s role at the outset was to provide management services to its parent, this specialisation was quickly offered to an independent client base with Technip and other players in the subsea and offshore industry becoming key clients.
In turn, the strong relationship that has grown up with these key clients has fuelled robust growth in services to the wider marine side of the offshore industry.
The result is that, today, the firm manages more than 6,000 seafarers worldwide and employs over 90 management support staff at its centres in Aberdeen, Clydebank, Houston, Mumbai and Singapore providing the core skills in crew management, recruitment, training and competence plus payroll services to the offshore market.
“We provide multinational crew for all marine or construction related disciplines in the offshore market,” says Aberdeen-based Regional Manager Rona D’Arcy.
“We can if required provide a full crew management service; everything from sourcing candidates, checking their compliance, ensuring they have the correct training/competence and certification for their role.
“In essence, we can provide the full crewing needs of a shipowner or operator and then manage their employment throughout.”
While Clydebank is headquarters, Aberdeen is assuming ever greater importance, encouraged by the currently exceptionally buoyant offshore industry where there is also heavy investment in new offshore support vessels of all types . . . from ERRVs through supply vessels and anchor handlers to sophisticated heavy construction, dive and pipelay vessels.
“We have local expertise delivered by a team that we’ve built up through long-standing relationships with clients in Aberdeen. Our office at Westhill is very important for enabling client liaison at a local level,” says D’Arcy.
“We can deal with any shipowner or operator globally. For example we have an important and growing presence in Singapore where we deliver the same services as Aberdeen. Depending on where the client is based, our objective is to provide a local service.”
There is heavy and growing emphasis on local content in the offshore industry, including personnel. Northern Marine has this base covered.
“As we have clients operating on a global basis, and Brazil is an example of a market where local content is very important, our team have specialist knowledge on local regulations regarding vessel manning,” says D’Arcy.
“We work with our clients, advising them what is possible and then move on through recruitment, dealing with such issues as visas and putting in place whatever systems and processes are needed to enable this.
“It’s about providing a seamless service for both client companies and prospective candidates.
“It’s our job to make sure that, at the end of the day, our clients have competent crew working on their assets who meet both local and industry requirements. We are an approved manning office working to MLC standards. We not only provide marine crew, we also provide construction and project crew as well.”
Northern Marine is not just about providing competent people and managing them on behalf of client shipowners/operators; training such people is also of considerable and growing importance to the company.
As a result, there has been considerable investment in providing state-of-the-art facilities in Aberdeen, linked through to Clydebank. The training is both classroom-based and practical and the course portfolio is tailored to fit with the specific requirements of particular clients. The approach is bespoke; not “one size fits all” and there has been significant investment in simulator resources.
Examples of courses include leadership, supervisory competence and bridge resource management which has grown out of mounting concern regarding the competence of a ship’s chain of command.
This was brought sharply into focus with the grounding of the cruise liner Costa Concordia in Italian waters.
There is a growing demand for this type of service and Northern Marine is ideally placed to deliver. It’s about effective communications on the bridge; ensuring that the chain of command works efficiently and with safety to the fore.
“The Aberdeen centre is now connected directly to our training centre at Clydebank,” says D’Arcy. “And not only do we train seafarers and offshore personnel, we’re now offering a range of courses in health and safety to office-based personnel. That has really been brought on with the recruitment of a specialist in-house trainer and is proving very popular in the local (Aberdeen) market.”
However, Northern Marine is a global company with global ambitions.
“We’re part of the Stena sphere and growing internationally; we’re not just an office in Aberdeen,” says D’Arcy.
“For example, Singapore is a big one for us and we are really starting to ramp up operations there. There’s so much going on out in Asia-Pacific.
“It’s slightly smaller than Aberdeen at the moment, but there is immense scope to grow the business. We’re already experiencing rapid expansion of activity in Singapore and that is set to continue.”
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