BSY Ship Mgmt. company, Hamburg, a huge conglomerate with several independent ship management companies had several sources of truth. Each office handling a seafarer had differing data about the same person – apart from duplicates and open dates.
Implementing a crewing system across to unify the databases was a Herculean task. Identifying the “right truth” and unifying the registers could take a large chunk of time. With all offices at loggerheads due to personality issues and vested interests, unifying to achieve a single database; getting all the offices to cooperate was considered IMPOSSIBLE. Resistance to unification from every single office and managers was so high. Inhouse development team had failed; at least two vendors had left the project soon after starting and, in the Customer’s, own words “ran away”.
SBNT took up the challenge and completed it successfully. One of the managers remarked “you deserve a Nobel prize for doing what all of us considered IMPOSSIBLE”. A remarkably successful change management approach.
