Today in Cyprus we visited three new companies. We started at Bernhard Ship Management Company, BSM for short, where we got to see a presentation and four training simulators for students. The training center was originally used as a British Royal Air Force base but has since been turned into a BSM training location. The guide told us that there are currently around 650 ships that are being manned by BSM and that they own 80 ships of their own. They don’t just train people to be crews on the ship, many people end up working in other industries such as travel agencies or hotels. BSM is owned by the Schulte group which owns many other companies, such as Eurasia Travel Network and Waypoint. In their training there are many codes they have to teach/follow such as the STCW95, Marpol, ILO, IMO and a few others. This is to ensure that the employees are emphasizing safety when they are manning these ships. Depending on the ship specialized training may have to be done that can take up to an extra week.
The next site we visited was also a ship management company called Columbia Ship Management. There are currently 22,000 seafarers working for CSM all across the globe. One of CSM’s values is diversity, which is why many of their employees are from the Philippines, Vietnam, India and many more countries. They have 9 main countries they work with, Cyprus (of course), Germany, Singapore, China, Italy, Greece, Norway, and Saudi Arabia. They are also very big on investing in other companies as well as consulting. They will often times invest in smaller companies that they believe can grow, but not invest so much that they practically own the other company. CSM is currently manning 650 vessels and owns 50 of their own ships as well as 3 private jets.
Our final stop for today was Medochemie. Here we learned a lot about project planning and supply chain. Many years are spent in the business planning/budget planning stage before production is finally set into motion. One thing I never realized was how much planning goes into making these products. Years and years of planning and research has to go into each drug they produce, which was surprising to me. I was inspired to maybe start planning more in my day-to-day life. After the presentation we visited the warehouse, which was around 2500 m2 and was able to hold around 7700 pallets of materials. Everything was very clean and well organized, which was why we had to sear feet coverings and a lab coat covering. They had many machines that would move these pallets around which I thought were very interesting. I was pretty happy with today and can’t wait to see what tomorrow entails!
