The recent oil slide has seen the supply chain become more open now than it’s ever been.
The sentiment was shared by Barry Marshall of 1st Integrated Safety Critical Solutions.
The firm, which received the financial backing of energy entrepreneur Ian Suttie, attended its first Offshore Technology Conference this year.
The company, which has five areas of focus, hopes to increase its turnover by 20%.
Marshall said he was confident in the growth increase despite the recent down cycle.
He credited the industry’s reinvorgiated appetite for brilliantly simple innovation and a recently opened dialogue environment for his confidence.
He said: “I think there’s a lot of complicated products out there, there’s a lot of different types of products out there and there’s a lot of companies which have a product which is, for example, for one winch but there are four or five different variants of it. What we’ve done is we’ve gone to market with a simplistic approach and tried to keep costs uniform across the range.
“I think we need to come back to the simplistic offering. There was a good analogy at one of the business breakfasts which was you look at the North Sea – how many platforms are out there? And when you look at the platforms what do they all do? They all do pretty much the same thing. And how many of them look the same? They don’t. They’re over-engineered.”
His take on the importance simplistic engineering echoed those of the #OG2050 panel discussing the recent Energy Voice research findings.
The panel said the industry must peel back the layers of complicated over-engineering to reveal the brilliance of simplistic innovation.
Statoil has also previously called for a more simplistic approach.
The oil price slide has also led to a few unintentional improvements according to Barry, including opening supply chain doors.
He said: “I think that’s one thing the downturn has given us is – it’s opened doors for us. It’s allowed us to engage with the supply chain.”
“People have been challenged from the top down to look at cost savings and if we can show how we can save costs they’re actually willing to have dialogue with us at that point. They’re more open now than they’ve ever been.”
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