Bibby Marine is a multinational marine services company that supplies floating accommodation and “walk-to-work” vessels for the offshore energy industry – oil and gas, as well as wind farms.
The company has seen remarkable growth in Australia since 2010, when it landed the contract to supply a floating accommodation facility for workers on the Gorgon LNG project in Western Australia.
Rick Newlyn, the company’s Australian representative, credits ICN with helping them get this foothold into the region.
“Barrow Island is a marine sanctuary, and they were only allowed to build so many land camps. What they had they thought was sufficient,” he says, adding project owner, Chevron, contacted them directly, facilitated through ICN.
“We were with the ICN, but it got taken out of everyone’s hands and was fast tracked.”
Bibby already had a floating accommodation facility getting refit and refurbished in Singapore.
“We happened to be in the region, and it all fired on from there,” Rick says.
“We were there for five years, and in the end, we had 600 workers on board. It was a very, very successful operation for the whole project.”
The next major project for Bibby in the Australasian region was in 2013, when the company provided the Bibby Progress facility to assist the Federal Government build the detention center on Manus Island in PNG.
“We’ve had smaller jobs in the region and we’re currently looking at windfarm operations,” Rick said.
“We have got a very long history in the management of all of operations, and that’s what the very, very large companies want. They want expertise. They want people to understand what safety means, what environmental issues are at sea and at anchorages, and so on.”
Bibby uses ICN to register its capabilities for the offshore energy sector so when a company needs its services, Rick gets an email letting him know there is a work package available.
“I go to that work package, I have a look at it, I do my homework on it, and if there is something there that we can fulfill on that basis, I then send an expression of interest to the company,” Rick says.
Bibby also uses ICN as a project owner to source local product and services for its worldwide supply chain.
Rick travels throughout the country for work and catches up with the ICN team wherever he goes.
“They’re all very knowledgeable people. You’re talking the talk with them, rather than talking to a bureaucrat or someone answering the phone.
“That for us in the industry, is very important. We need to know the people understand what we are doing in the offshore industry, because it’s not that well known.”
In fact, Rick believes ICN is up with the best international procurement and supply chain services, both as a supplier and project management platform.
“I don’t think we could do without it,” he said. “We are a product of ICN and that is recognised at our head office in the UK. We’ll continue on, that’s for sure.”
For more information, follow Bibby Marine on LinkedIn or go to www.bibbymarine.com.
