Cultural change in Norway: Offshore learns Lean Management

Norway's economic rise began with the discovery of oil off its coast in 1969. With the revenues from the oil business, the country built up a sovereign wealth fund worth billions, offers its inhabitants a high standard of living and employees in the oil industry above-average salaries on comfortable terms.

Since the oil price has collapsed worldwide, the Norwegians have felt the need to take action. The cost-intensive extraction of oil off the coast of Norway is no longer profitable under the current conditions. Some platforms are already lying unused off the coast.

The oil companies are reacting to the oil price development by cutting jobs and cancelling social benefits and vacations. However, these measures alone will not be enough to make the oil industry profitable again. The industry must become much more efficient in its work processes in order to increase productivity at reduced costs.

To this end, Lean Maritime has been working in the Norwegian city of Bergen and on the offshore platforms since September. "With our Lean methods, we can implement new approaches to working time models directly on site in order to reduce the previous waste of resources," says Managing Director Theo Herzog.

The focus is on the planning and organization of activities, e.g. the synchronization of parallel or sequential work processes. Areas such as material availability or technical failures are also analyzed. Based on Lean principles such as flow, Takt, pull, zero defects or reactivity, processes are implemented together with the workers on site that quickly lead to higher productivity. "Thanks to our clever work organization, we are increasing the productivity of the processes on the platforms in the high double-digit range. This is a real cultural change here," the consultants summarize.

In the course of redesigning processes, the focus is on the workflows of the approximately 500 highly qualified employees and not on cutting their jobs. The workers are trained by consultants on site in Norway to work with the new processes and to follow them: for higher productivity and satisfied customers.

Even if the oil price increases again in the future - this Norwegian offshore company is ahead for now!