E.R.Schiffahrt Goes Global With Viking
On renewing its safety equipment servicing contracts, Germany’s E.R. Schiffahrt, a leading ship-owner and ship management company, chose to take a leading edge approach. By custom-tailoring a Ship-owner Agreement servicing contract offered by VIKING Life-Saving Equipment, the shipping company has managed to create a global servicing agreement supported at 42 locations with a single point of contact.
Working closely with VIKING analysts, E.R.Schiffahrt’s team went over the numbers, drawing upon their own experience and the advice of VIKING safety experts. The deal the two companies came up with is a comprehensive one covering life-rafts, lifeboats, immersion suits, lifejackets and marine fire systems and equipment such as fire extinguishers on more than 30 vessels of the ship-owner’s fleet. The plan is for VIKING to manage not just service notifications, but also the coordination of all servicing.
Advantages
While lifeboats and marine fire equipment will be covered under a fixed-price servicing arrangement, E.R. Schiffahrt saw advantages in replacing other brand life-rafts with VIKING products. Together with the immersion suits, these new life-rafts will be serviced via fixed-price exchange, which sees products simply being swapped out as their certificates expire. VIKING maintains a worldwide exchange pool for life-raft servicing at VIKING-owned stations in 42 strategic ports. A number of newbuilds are also included in the tailored Ship-owner Agreement.
Lutz Mentzel, E.R.Schiffahrt’s Procurement Manager, commented “Our company strategy drives us to constantly find new ways to lead the market and so we naturally apply the same thinking to our servicing contracts. A Ship-owner Agreement made a lot of sense to us, particularly in terms of time-savings and the predictability of servicing costs. And VIKING’s insightful analysis helped us to customize the contract for our exact needs.”
Business Acumen
“It’s exciting for us that far-sighted ship-owners like E.R. Schiffahrt have the business acumen to revisit the way safety equipment servicing is structured and managed”, says Jorgen Holm, Sales Director. “There’s a lot to be gained by dropping conventional approaches and adopting new best practices.” VIKING is experiencing heavy demand for its innovative Ship-owner Agreements, which offer a large range of options and can include additional flexibility during the life of the agreement to cater for ship-owners’ changing requirements.