Here it is:
WILLIAM BOEI
Sun Business Reporter
Have you heard the one about about the ship's captain who boasted to passengers over dinner that his ship had so much
electronic navigation gear nothing could ever go wrong?
The ship ran aground just as he was finishing his story, according to the folks at Offshore Systems Ltd. in North Vancouver.
Offshore makes precision navigation systems, and of course the ship that ran aground was carrying a competitor's gear. It lost a
connection to one of its sensors, and it didn't have a built-in warning system system to alert the crew.
"When they looked at the chart, the ship looked great," Offshore training coordinator Gwil Roberts explained. "But in practice,
it was a couple of dozen miles off course."
He added: "There's nothing worse than an electronic-chart-assisted grounding, as they call it. Our system would never do that."
Offshore Systems itself has been sailing through perilous waters for a couple of years.
Not long after it decided to concentrate on navigation systems for commercial ships, the commercial shipping sector hit a global
recession, president and CEO John Jacobson said. Commercial sales slowed to a crawl and Offshore has been losing money.
"We've been through a pretty wrenching restructuring over the last five quarters," Jacobson said.
Staff was reduced, vice-presidents were let go, and Offshore has been trying to refocus on its long-time bread-and-butter
market: navy and coast guard navigation systems.
Offshore now says it has turned a corner.
In September, Canada's department of national defence adopted Offshore's system as a standard navigation instrument on
major naval vessels. The Canadian and U.S. coast guards have recently placed new orders. And earlier this month, Industry
Minister John Manley came through with a $4-million investment that Offshore will use to update its electronic chart display
systems.
"That leverages us," said Andrew Carniel, Offshore's director of operations. "It allows us to carry a large enough research and
development team to do the type of development we want to do, which is to bring our commercialized products into the military
market."
Carniel said the U.S. Navy and NATO are both developing new specifications for military navigation systems, and Offshore
wants to be the first company to have its products certified under those standards. The federal Technology Partnerships Canada
investment, repayable through royalties, will finance about a third of a three-year, $12-million development program and will
help Offshore - which now has 53 employees - create about 30 new jobs.
The standards upgrade will build on what Offshore confidently says is already the best technology in the world.
"It's based on a pretty simple principle," Carniel said. "It tells you where you are, very, very accurately."
The system - called electronic chart precise integrated navigation system or Ecpins - combines information from global
positioning satellites, gyro compasses, speed logs, radar systems, and in the case of a high-tech navy ship, hundreds of other
sensors.
All this information is displayed on a high-resolution screen on what looks like an upright video-arcade machine, complete with
grab bars in case of rough seas. The main console sits on the ship's bridge, but others can be strategically placed in spots like
the captain's cabin. "It allows the operators of the vessel to look at the screen, know where they are and where they're going in
relation to the ocean floor, other marine traffic on the surface, navigation aids such as buoys, and of course the coast line,"
Carniel said.
And while competing systems work well in open water, Offshore - which pioneered the technology in the early 1990s - says its
version is the only one that functions properly in congested waterways, even with visibility problems.
"Imagine trying to get across Burrard Inlet in dense fog," Carniel said. "You've got the Seabus coming across, and you've got
cruise ships coming and going. In most cases, in zero visibility you would be forced to weigh anchor. With our system aboard,
that's not necessary." Roberts said Ecpins can show a ship's precise position anywhere on the globe, in real time, within one
metre.
Offshore scored a major success in the mid-1990s when it sold Ecpins systems to 80 per cent of the large commercial vessels
that ply the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River system.
In the last three years, according to a Canadian Shipowners Association study, "occurrences" such as groundings and collisions
with buoys, bridges, docks and other ships in the Great Lakes system have been reduced by 75 per cent, saving shipping
companies tens of millions of dollars per year. Jacobson said that's the kind of performance Offshore is trying to improve on,
and the company has drawn "intense interest" from the Canadian navy and the U.S. Coast Guard.
Although Offshore is practically invisible to the non-seafaring public, most people have probably seen its Ecpins system in use
on the nightly TV news.
The U.S. Coast Guard uses it every time it searches for wreckage from a plane crash, including the 1996 TWA Flight 800
airliner off New York, this year's crash of John F. Kennedy Jr.'s small plane, and the recent Air Egypt disaster. News clips
typically show naval officers pointing to locations on a display screen - usually supplied by Offshore. Canadian vessels used the
same system to keep track of vessel and personnel movement during the 1997 APEC conference in Vancouver. And during the
1995 cod war off Newfoundland, it helped track a Spanish fishing trawler. This fall, Canada's defence department said navy
ships are using Ecpins to support peacekeeping operations in East Timor. Jacobson said Offshore isn't abandoning commercial
markets, just recognizing that they're still unhealthy, while military markets are in a growth phase.
Offshore Systems Ltd. is one of three subsidiaries of Offshore Systems International Ltd., a public company. The other
subsidiaries include one that distributes Japanese marine equipment in the Americas, and an electronic navigation chart producer
and distributor. (The chart company recently delivered a complete set of naval charts to Kuwait because of the Gulf War,
Jacobson said. "The Iraqis walked off with all the originals.")
Shares of Offshore Systems International Ltd. (TSE, VSE: OSI) traded as high as 65 cents last February. They bottomed out at
25 cents in early October. Last week's Industry Canada announcement gave them a boost, and on Friday they closed at 50
cents, up a nickel.
William Boei, Business Reporter,
The Vancouver Sun
200 Granville Street, Suite 1, Vancouver, BC Canada V6C 3N3
Phone: 604 605-2165 / fax: 604 605-2320
email: bboei@pacpress.southam.ca |
