BACKGROUND

Superintendents play a critical role in shipping management. Ships are increasing in sophistication and the operations of ships growing in complexity. To secure safe and efficient operations and achieve economic success, shipping companies rely on superintendents’ skills and competencies. According to DNV Seaskill, the superintendents must have the knowledge and be responsible to the ship’s, Conventions and Class Rules, Budgets and Costs, Purchasing, Quality, Safety, Security and Environment, Project Management, Information Technology, Ship Performance, Dry-docking, Port State Control, Sale and Purchase, Certifications and Surveys, Emergency and others.

There are two types of superintendents namely, Technical and Marine Superintendents. They are the persons responsible in handling the technical and operations management of the ships. As a general responsibility, marine superintendents handle the ship’s port, insurance, safety and navigational operations while the technical superintendents handle the ship’s hull, equipment, machinery maintenance, supplies, repairs and drydocking. They are either Mechanical/Electrical Engineers, ship’s Engineers or Mates who decided to leave the sea life and dedicated to work on land.

An average of three (3) to five (5) ships are under the superintendency of one (1) superintendent. Their monthly salaries in the domestic industry ranges from Php 30,000 to 150,000 while in the international industry ranges from USD 3,500 to 10,000. The foreign employed superintendents contribute to the dollar remittances and are considered as an OFW. Japan, Singapore and Europe are the countries who mostly employ Pilipino superintendents, and the demand are presently increasing due to its competitive rate against Indians, Europeans and Japanese. These is other than the technical capability of the Pilipinos and its language advantage in English and some in Spanish

RESPONSIBILITES, QUALIFICATIONS AND COMPETENCIES

To be more specific, below are some of their responsibilities:

Marine Superintendents:

• Cargo Carriage. The safe operation of the fleet in respect to the loading, discharge and carriage of cargo.
• Personnel, Briefing of senior officers.
• Marine Insurance
• Law – maritime
• Chartering
• Control and Operations. The recording of any accidents and the follow up of these accidents to both management and the fleet with the object of avoiding similar accidents in the future.
• Nautical Equipment and Navigation. The safe navigation of the fleet.
• Advising management on safety and environmental policy requirements. The implementation of the management’s health, safety and environmental policy.

Technical Superintendents:

• Technical advice to the fleet.
• Maintaining safety standards.
• Organizing and co-coordinating repairs worldwide.
• Control Systems – pneumatics, hydraulics, electronics
• Approval and purchase of spare gear.
• Liaison with equipment manufacturers.
• Negotiation and authorization of invoices.
• Preparation and control of budgets.
• Processing hull and machinery damage claims.
• reparation of specifications for dry dockings and refits.
• irect supervision of dry-dockings and repairs.
• riefing of senior officers.
• uarantee work.
• pecial projects.

According to Mr. William Swigart of Santana Shipping on his speech at the 2005 Shipmanagement Conference, jokily expressed that some of the required superintendents’ competencies and KPI’s in handling ships are:

• Zero accidents to crew or vessel
• Look after everything without bothering the owner
• No bills
• Ship maintained to last for ever
• Fast vessels with no fuel consumption which are always in the right place for the best paying business
• Instant compliance with all new rules and regulations.
• Robot crews that work 24hrs a day and never need feeding, paying or leave and that can be trained by a modem link while they work
• Perfect performance to the requirements of the Owner’s customer

To further evaluate and learn more about the superintendents, Mr David Furnivval of Dorchester Maritime enumerated the best qualification for the superintendents, as he spoke in the first Superintendents Forum.

• Supt must be vastly experienced,
• a natural arbitrator and assessor,
• a statistician who can conform with the company’s key performance indicator (KPI) goals,
• an interpreter of new legislation,
• in possession of a photographic memory,
• possibly an insomniac, and
• Preferably single.” Unsurprising, young, and unmarried persons are favored by the industry. But difficult to skillfully blend youth with experience.

Am in the affirmation with Mr Furnivval, but has to add two more qualifications:

• always be in good health and
• must not get sick at any given time.

PHILIPPINES AS THE GOOD SOURCE OF SUPERINTENDENTS

The Philippines is a good source of internationally trained Masters and Chief Engineers who could become a good manpower pool for Ship management. Other countries like Japan, Europe and Greece whose pool of shipping technical people are retiring with less or no replacements coming from their declining pool of Chief Engineers and Masters. They are faced and forced to embrace outsourcing of technical manpower which are shared by the two emerging seafaring countries, India and the Philippines. India has already existing and well-trained superintendents but the Philippines has not gone yet to the first phase of developing or exploiting its expertise. Similar to India, we are an English-speaking country and yet India is ahead in the market. In fact, many of the Indian superintendents have put up their own successful ship-management companies.

Greece, Europe and Japanese situations are a great opportunity for the Philippines. Although there are already Filipino superintendents working in Japan, Singapore, Malaysia and locally with about 30 foreign Ship-management companies, it still needs a wake-up call to build up the confidence and utilize the available dormant reserves. These countries are turning their manpower sourcing to Filipinos to replace their aging and retiring ship management staffs. This situation indicates an opportunity for our shipping people and should wake us up to develop our own pool of superintendents.

ASSESSMENT

Filipinos are believed to be a good seafarer especially in handling old ships, but our superintendents are not yet fully grown. Could that be due to the non development of local ship management that will serve as training ground for our seafarers? Or the unity of each other or support from the industry in providing them trainings? Or a training facility or systems is required to be developed.

These superintendents are employed based on their ships experience. No formal education is available in our country and superintendents train by themselves thru reading books that are limited in the maritime library or bookshelves, hands on self-study or by senior superintendents who were trained beforehand thru actual experiences.

RECOMMENDATION

The author believes that developing a superintendency course is an industry call. This has been done by the Marine and Technical Superintendents Associations of the Philippines Corp. (MTSAP), as one of their objectives. However, the organization is at its own feet in providing free seminars and trainings. It is the authors belief that the development of an online training platform for the superintendency course is necessary. That is for a simple reason that candidate superintendents are mostly onboard the ships or existing superintendents who wants to improve their skills are too tight on their work responsibilities.

The Superintendent	MTSAP Founding Members
Rey C. Eustaquio Author – MTSAP Chairman of the Board