2017 at OPMS – 3 New Clients, 1 Record-Breaking Project and 852…

In the middle of the year, Go Inshore was purchased by Odyssey Marine and OPMS was retained as the HR software of choice. This was an unusual implementation with OPMS being both, the legacy and the new software. It was hands down the smoothest data transfer we’ve ever done.  

Roughly at the same time, Technip started on Prelude and Ichthys projects. Prelude has been a record-breaker for us -  based on the personnel on board, it’s twice the size of the previously largest facility (Castorone in 2015) managed with OPMS. As such it’s probably resulted in twice as many development initiatives. It has challenged us in many levels and rapidly accelerated the growth of OPMS.

More recently, Teekay Shipping joined our client base with the implementation project currently ongoing for the Ningaloo Vision crew. Again, huge thanks to the Teekay’s employees who recommended OPMS and are now working hard to maximize the organisational benefits OPMS delivers. Read more here.

Statistics on what you’ve suggested

Within the year, a total of 906 development requests were raised, of which 67% were suggested by the current software users. That’s massive and I thank you for your feedback. OPMS gets stronger every year thanks to you.

We’ve worked hard, and our programmers have completed 852 development requests. We still have many requests in the backlog from previous years, however, the strength of the current team is reflected in the fact that 84.77% of the requests raised this year have already been resolved. In the years to come, we’d like to improve the response rate even further.

Matthew, Clayton, Max, Liam and of course Colin – thank you for these fantastic results.

As demonstrated above, we have established a very strong and stable team.

The biggest hits

Not all development requests are equal. I have shortlisted some of my personal favourites below. Perhaps next year, we should get your votes on the “Biggest Hits of 2018”..?

• Filters in Roster and Training Matrixes

  When Prelude commenced, it quickly became evident that we need more filtering options in the Roster and Training screens. The filters already existed for personnel on board, a crew change, positions or teams, though that was not enough when managing huge sites.
  Today, OPMS users can have any number of filters to quickly see: Who is on night shift? Who is attending a training booking? Who’s allocated on a selected helicopter or flight? And the list goes on...
  Everyone is accustomed to the filtering options in Excel and they are brilliant, yet even Excel has its limitations. When creating rosters in Excel, it’s difficult to filter for selected data within the selected period. In that respect, OPMS’s filters now top Excel’s.

• Pay Rates, Charge Rates and Cost to Company

  For the first time in history, OPMS holds the contract rates against the position and work activity information. Our clients can produce revenue forecasts and invoices within seconds. We’ve had a lot of positive feedback about this new module.

• Employment Application

  Early in the year, we released our own online application within OPMS Web Portal. In the past, the user interface for online applications have been at the hands of each company’s web developers. This is costly and inflexible.
  OPMS standard employment application is available to all our clients. It is quick to implement, easy to use and is always in sync with OPMS. To put the success of this module in numbers, 5418 applications have been submitted and 48 253 documents uploaded by candidates, so our users don’t have to.

• More Custom Reports

  Another area of focus has been OPMS reporting. As our client base grows, so do different reporting requirements. Standard reporting package doesn’t cut it and spending development time on changing fonts, colours etc. also doesn’t work. The only solution is to have fully flexible reports which users can design and customize themselves. We’ve introduced merge field and template based reports in all key modules of OPMS and it has simplified reporting from both, programming and user interface perspective.

What’s coming in 2018?

OPMS development work never stops and it looks like we’ll also never run out of ideas and suggestions for the next projects. Early this year, we’ll be releasing a renewed Logistics Management module. I look forward to introducing our users to this module as already in development and testing phases, we can see how useful it is. It will provide an instant summary of number of travellers on each flight and helicopter, allow producing flexible manifests, totals weights on each flight, allows scheduling regular travel arrangements and much more.

We’ll be also doing more work on previously mentioned filters and will be introducing multi-level sorting. Each user will be able to sort personnel according to their preference, including sorting by back to backs.

These are the initial plans for early 2018. I would guess that it’s roughly 10% of what we’ll achieve in the entire year. Stay tuned for more!

Wishing you all a happy, rewording and a productive year ahead!

Kind Regards,

Tiiu Tiisaar

General Manager, OPMS