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The Harbour ConsultantsAround 15 vessels use this one every day,including giant ocean going ships, complexoffshore pipe laying vessels, supply vesselsand crew ships that travel back and forth tothe platforms. The company is responsible formoving everything within the OSC and our roleis to help them increase client satisfaction tothe levels of other OSCs across the globe byinstalling Operational Excellence and coachingtheir workforce. We’re also working withProcurement, Finance and HR.The long and winding roadBy law every company that wants to do businesshere has to have a local partner, so this OSCis a joint venture with a local oil company. Itwas carved out of nothing, expanded incrediblyfast and is now so vast that the only way to getaround it is by car. We arrive on site at 7.00am and work through till around 7.30 pm. It’sincredibly hot, 30 o C every day, and very dusty.In fact, there’s so much dust that there’s actually ateam of people who regularly sweep the roads.The site entrance is a long and bumpy, dirt roadwith a sign on the gate that says: ‘No Guns.No Alcohol.’ Container trucks rumble up it dayand night and it’s so bumpy that once a truckflipped over. Our biggest problem in getting toand from work is the traffic. In the last 10 years,hundreds of thousands of people have pouredinto the cities from the countryside, but at themoment there simply isn’t the infrastructureto handle all these people. There’s very littlepublic transport, so everyone gets around bycar and they all drive really fast, which meansthat the only option is to take your life in yourhands and force your way through. It’s crazy.Some days it takes us 2 hours to get from thebase to our guesthouse – and that’s only 6km.Zinho, Pépé and ZézéThere are 4 Celerant consultants on site, 3from the French office and a Portuguese-SouthAfrican colleague. There’s also a VP who comesout once a month to oversee the project. Wecompleted our analysis in October 2011 andbegan the project in November with the aim ofintroducing a totally new culture of performance.We began by putting in place a visual managementsystem which allows Managers to see exactlywhat’s happening across the OSC at any givenpoint. We also implemented a planning systemthat listed each worker’s full name and detailedall the tasks that needed to be done. At firstthough, the Manager in charge of planning eachday’s activities was reluctant to put names againsteach task. We couldn’t understand why he didn’tknow who was supposed to be doing what,until finally he told us. It was because nearlyevery member of the team has a nickname,just like Brazilian footballers. People only knowyou by your nickname, Zinho, Pépé, Zézé andso on, so it was almost impossible for him toput a face to their correct name.Missing parts and ever present mosquitoesAround 800 people work at the OSC, plusall the clients from the Oil & Gas companies.‘ Everywhere youlook there areskylines of cranesand new publicworks racing tocreate a moderninfrastructure inrecord time.’10CLOSEWORK® GLOBAL REVIEW 2012