Page 35 - Danish Offshore Industry 2019

of SubC Partner to whom the inaccessible splash zone is customers and their jobs. From being a shop where a job
home grounds. was done by a man in a boiler suit wearing a welding
screen to a place where a solution is now gradually
SubC Partner is working both above and below the developed, and where part of the process takes place
surface of the water and in the critical zone between at desks and in the client’s development department,
the two elements. Previously, solutions offering access before the welding flame is ignited.”
to work at the splash zone had been mostly depending
on the weather, and often it called for a major setup “We get involved in projects at a much earlier stage. Be-
requiring the use of assisting vessels and barges. Today fore, we were producers or suppliers, today, we are part-
it is possible to do the job easier, better, faster and safer, ners in a development process,” states Tonny Klein. “We
and at the same time gather valuable information of the are now involved in a much greater part of the value
structural steel in the splash zone. chain as we have managed to develop our company. We
still weld at our workshop, but it tells a lot about us, that
“Previously, we only produced the items asked for by our today we have more engineers than welders on our staff.
customers and performed only the jobs we were con- In that way we are increasing the value to our customer
tracted to handle,” tells Tonny Klein, CEO, SubC Partner. of the job, we are handling.”
“Today, we develop solutions in close cooperation with
our clients. Through innovation we now have a different A SWISS KNIFE FOR THE SPLASH ZONE
way of working and a completely new and better rela- A typical example of this development is the crawler
tionship to our customers.” used for cleaning and inspection of structures located
in the splash zone. This innovative crawler has been
POSITIVE RESPONSE FROM CLIENTS developed especially for visual inspections of welding’s
He is convinced that to a large extent the crisis hitting and measuring of thickness to verify the integrity of an
the offshore industry has contributed to shaping this offshore structure. Another special feature for the crawl-
change. Both in the industry, itself, and in SubC Partners. er is the saw which – by diamond wire cutting – is able
“Before the oil prices took their steep dive it was a ques-
tion of solving a problem here and now, not really to de-
velop a smarter way of handling the situation tomorrow
and in the future.”

“We used to spend lots of money developing solutions
in which we thought our customers would take interest
– but we never found a market for our efforts,” Tonny WHEN THE PRICE OF
Klein explains.
OIL HAD STABLILIZED

Everything changed when the oil prices collapsed and
settled far below the US$100 we all had been used to AT US$100 INNOVATION
TO SAVE COSTS WAS
see.
NOT OF INTEREST.
“New ideas got a more positive response, and soon it
became obvious that if you wanted to get a bite of the
cheese, you had to do your job smarter and cheaper. BUT TIMES HAVE
An attitude grew up where innovative solutions and CHANGED, AND SO
partnerships for their development were the name of
the game.” HAS OUR COMPANY
TONNY KLEIN, CEO, SUBC PARTNER
INNOVATION INCREASING VALUE
“We used this demand for changing our approach to our

33 / SUBC PARTNER