Tsakos Columbia Shipmanagement Boosts Safety

Due to own initiative and increasing industry requirements, Tsakos Columbia Shipmanagement (TCM) took the initiative to review its personnel competence management system using 3rd party experts from DNV GL Maritime Advisory.

In its pursuit for continual improvement, TCM launched this project activity which has given an external and independent view on how the company manages competence within their company during governance, planning, training and assessment of both shore and sea personnel. The project objective was to identify improvement areas ensuring further safe operation of their vessels and thereby safeguarding seafarer’s well-being and the vessels’ condition.

The maritime industry has come far in establishing the minimum manning standards and levels as defined in SOLAS (Safety Of Life At Sea) and the STCW (Standards of Training, Certification and Watchkeeping for Seafarers). However, Tsakos Columbia Shipmanagement has decided to go beyond this and is currently working on implementing further best practices identified during the project from the maritime industry as well as others. One example is the risk management approach from the oil and gas industry, where safety critical task assessment is performed to focus the training and competence building resources on the tasks with high criticality.

“The cooperative attitude that TCM’s personnel showed us as an independent external partner assisted greatly in the fulfilment of the initial objectives of the project. Both areas of improvement and strengths could be openly discussed, and the project team was given full access to documentation as well as a significant amount of hours for interviews with relevant stakeholders.” concludes DNV GL`s Maritime Advisory Project manager Jarle Blomhoff.