DHAHRAN, 17 March 2008 — Saudi Aramco serves energy customers around the globe, but for the Industrial Services Organization, the customers are a lot closer to home. Industrial Services supports Saudi Aramco’s business lines, dozens of organizations and tens of thousands of company employees. Throughout the company’s 75-year history, there has been a consistent goal of providing Saudi Aramco’s employees with the highest quality of service delivered in the fastest, most efficient manner possible.
That won’t change, according to executive director Amer A. Al-Sulaim, but the way its five departments support those customers is changing as the organization fine tunes its operations to significantly boost local employment and the Kingdom’s economy.
The Mechanical Shops and Services Department (MSSD) keeps the company’s infrastructure humming; the Roads and Heavy Equipment Department (R&HED) designs and builds the byways at company facilities and sometimes the highways that connect them; Transportation manages more than 11,000 vehicles that use those roads; Aviation is responsible for the world’s largest private air carrier, and Marine tends to the needs of offshore drillers and operators as well as helping supertankers enter and leave Saudi Aramco ports and terminals.
Although these organizations will continue those tasks, they are moving from being service providers to becoming managers of private-sector service providers. It’s another aspect of Saudization. That move means different things for different departments, but the common theme is to build the private sector so it can give the same quality of service that the company would provide itself — a prerequisite before any transfer is considered.
One factor is the maturity of the local market. For Transportation and R&HED, the Kingdom’s private sectors already are well-developed, so vehicle fleets and highway construction can be outsourced. For MSSD, it’s a combination of developing mechanics in-house while working with local companies to develop their abilities.
For Aviation and Marine, it’s a little more complicated, from helping develop in-Kingdom shipyards and educating seamen to the formation of regional marine and aviation associations or developing an extremely high-tech work force.
Another important theme is teamwork, which also takes on a variety of definitions, from grooming young mechanics for the company’s in-house shops to helping contractors develop the skills to become seamless service providers.
Transportation has been a leader in Saudization and transfers to the private sector, with more than 90 percent of its assets now leased and 98 percent Saudi content in its departmental work force. The department oversees nearly 10,000 light vehicles and more than 420 buses as well as such specialty vehicles as fire engines, ambulances, power line maintenance trucks and heavy rig-moving equipment. Of that 11,000-vehicle fleet, only about 600 are owned by the company.
“We are moving from doing the job to managing the job,” said Abdulkareem A. Shaikh, a senior planning analyst in Transportation. “We are pioneers in that way because we started moving in that direction a long time ago. The only thing we have left to do is to move our remaining 600 vehicles into the local market.”
“Bringing contractors up to Saudi Aramco standards was a very big challenge for us in the beginning,” said Transportation Engineer Maher H. Meer. “I think we’ve done a good job on that, and now most of the contractors know what the company’s standards are before they take the job.”
For R&HED, in addition to overseeing massive equipment and road projects, training is a big priority. It oversees the company’s driver education program as well as certification programs for heavy-equipment operators, even assisting the Kingdom’s Traffic Police with the certification of private operators. Highway engineers are assigned to work on mega-project teams to ensure that access to construction sites can handle the heavy truck traffic and that the roads serving these facilities will be safe for day-to-day traffic after the plants are up and running.
“There are fewer of us than there was when I started,” said Saleh A. Abdulgader, supervisor of the Southern Area Roads Engineering Unit. “Much more is done in the private sector today.” It’s a pattern that’s repeated across the organization.
“Building up the Saudi economy is more than a matter of spending money,” said Salem A. Shehry, supervisor of the Marine Planning, Programming and Materials Supply Unit. “It’s also about transferring the culture of Saudi Aramco to maintain the quality of service. Teamwork starts with our customers and goes all the way down to the engine room of one of our vessels. ... A delay of a single hour will echo across the company, and this reflects how critical the function of the Marine Department is.”
“One of our aircraft would never leave the ground without teamwork,” said Khalid H. Alnatour, chief pilot of the Airplane Aircrew Division. “I think one of our biggest challenges is to predict the company’s demands on our services in advance because there is such a long lead time in procuring equipment and training people.” With a world economy in high gear, everyone wants maintenance engineers, technicians and pilots. “We have a steady flow of pilots in the pipeline, but there’s a long lead time,” Alnatour said.
The Aviation Department does outsource many of its requirements, but with one of the most demanding schedules of any air carrier in the world, technical competency is a key consideration. “It takes about eight to 10 years to start relying on a mechanic,” said Ali A. Ashban, manager of the Aviation Department.
“He spends two years as an apprentice and then three years in New Zealand in training. Then it takes a couple years to get his A&P (airframe and powerplant) certificate.”
When it comes to preparing a competent work force, Marine has some experience under its belt. Much of the crews, officer corps and onshore support staff already has been outsourced because of intensive development of the Kingdom’s marine contractors. Saudi Aramco’s Marine Academy opened to Saudi contractors so they could begin maritime careers in the private sector. Now the startup of a private-sector academy is accelerating that process.
“We recognize contractors who are doing a good job and encourage them to share their experiences with other contractors so that they can improve, too,” Shehry said. “We’re looking forward to the day when our vessels will have full Saudi content. Hopefully this will be in the near future.”
MSSD has a different set of challenges, outsourcing what activities it can. The company’s shops are vital sources of ability and expertise to keep critical equipment running. Although the shops work with many private-sector partners, the knowledge transfer here is from one generation to the next.
“One of our priorities is sharing the knowledge we have here,” said technical adviser Omer M. Osman. “Over the last 10 years, a lot of our experts have retired. We make sure that the young people get the benefits of that knowledge now so it doesn’t get lost,” he said.
The old hands say they’re pleased with the new hires.
“This new generation is very well-educated,” said Sulaiman D. Rasheed, supervisor of Shops Maintenance Engineering. “They grasp ideas very, very fast, and they speak English quite well. In addition to the normal training they receive, we pair them up with our senior technicians and interact with Quality Assurance and engineers, so they get access to a lot of technical information.”
It’s an approach that appears to be paying off. “Before he retired, one of the guys said that I should stay close to the old guys because they are like moving manuals,” said Aodi A. Mohaini, a maintenance machinist originally from Hail and now in his third year at the shops. “Some of the information they have may not be written in the manuals for the job, so I try to spend a lot of time with them. ... You can’t do some of these jobs by yourself; you need to work as a team. Even if a job could be done alone, we still work as a team so that everybody learns from it.”
At Saudi Aramco, young people are introduced to much more than technical information. “I feel like I’m part of the team here,” said Mohammed A. Qahtani, a young aircraft maintenance technician from Dammam. “This feels more like my family - my father, my brothers - than just work. If you need anything, they will help you, and that makes you want to improve yourself. If I have suggestions, I tell my foreman. If it’s a good idea, he’ll tell me to do it; if not, he’ll tell me why it’s not a good idea, and we’ll do something else. Even that can be a learning experience.”
Confidence and a commitment to quality also is being transferred from one generation to the next.
“At first, I was a little scared even to turn a switch on an aircraft, said Salih N. Turaif, an avionics technician from Dammam recently returned from studies in New Zealand, “but they’ve helped me gain the confidence I need to do my job. Now I can do these things easily. Saudi Aramco has taught me a lot. Studying out of Kingdom taught me how to rely on myself. In technical careers, everything has to be perfect, and that carries over into everything you do.”