Every single person, organisation and government globally have felt the impact of Covid-19 and the ensuing crisis. Everyone is trying to respond appropriately while adhering to the government’s guidelines and maintaining a certain level of “normal”.
At Marine Technical Limits (MTL) we have stringent business contingency measures in place, we had the right tools at our disposal to enable working from home and we remain flexible in our ability to continue to deliver projects and work scopes for our global clientele.
In 2003 our director’s Matt Lewin and Calum MacLean came together to create MTL. This happened within the homes of our two directors who have significant knowledge and a keen interest in new and developing technologies. So, right from the start, MTL has been a very agile, flexible and forward-thinking organisation when it comes to working remotely.
As early adopters of new technologies, our specialists have always been able to deliver services to our clients – no matter where they are in the world. We can do this because we invest in systems and structures which are secure but allow us to access the right information at any time. These include; Office 365, reliable VPN set up, NAS drive working, and cloud storage/back up.
Further to this our own proprietary software, PYXIS, and our in-house Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software have been built to be accessible anywhere in the world, across multiple devices.
As a result of this way of working our teams have continued to work through this crisis, with no downtime and very little, if any drop in productivity. Our infrastructure and technology are already in place, the challenge has been to support personnel in adapting and adopting good working practices.
When lockdown was announced, we had eight people offshore across three separate assets. Our transition to homeworking for office personnel happened over the course of a few days and during this time we were able to provide uninterrupted onshore engineering support.
As part of our client’s responses, all our teams were demobbed. However, as operators and industry groups establish procedures to minimise the risk posed to offshore workers we have now mobilised to an offshore asset to undertake a safety critical repair scope. Our onshore team is continuing to support our offshore workforce, who are stringently following our clients’ COVID-19 management procedures. We are also continuing to prepare for several other offshore projects which may resume in the coming weeks while also supporting new scopes of work that are coming into our teams.
We have put in place a rota to maintain critical workshop activities, which enables us to follow social distancing guidelines while continuing to prepare equipment and materials to support critical offshore scopes.
As this virus continues to spread our thoughts go out to all those people impacted by this terrible disease, we are continuing to follow the latest information by the government and will make every effort to communicate with our employees and clients, as and when it is appropriate.