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Picture a muster drill on an offshore platform. The alarm sounds, dozens of workers — speaking a dozen different languages — move quickly to their assigned muster stations. Someone is counting heads, cross-referencing lists, sending a status report back to headquarters. It has to work. Every time. In under ten minutes.
Now ask yourself: who made sure the technology behind that drill was actually fit for purpose? Who checked the zone classifications, validated the product certifications, convinced a sceptical crew to hang up their paper T-cards, and stayed on the line at 2am when something needed fixing?
The answer, more often than you might think, is someone like Simon Rech.
Simon is a Project Lead at Axians, the technology integration arm of the Vinci Group — one of the world’s largest construction and infrastructure multinationals. He does not live on a vessel. He works on land, in Italy, moving between engineering offices, customer sites, and factory acceptance tests. But his fingerprints are on offshore safety systems operating in some of the world’s most demanding environments.
We sat down with him to talk about what it really takes to get these systems built, installed, and running.
Simon’s path to offshore oil and gas was anything but direct. He started in IT support in 2013, then moved into systems engineering before joining Axians in 2017 looking for something more varied.
“I wanted more freedom and to see different kinds of scenarios — different clients, different problems.”
What he found was a consulting environment that exposed him to everything: telephony, networking, data centres, video surveillance, and eventually the project management of large international installations in oil and gas, transportation, and even for a space agency.
The early years were intense. As one of very few people handling oil and gas at Axians, Simon wore every hat simultaneously.
“I was project manager, project engineer, the whole package in one guy — which almost killed me. But after a few years I now know a lot about the whole process.”
Critically, he also went to the field. He followed commissioning work, did installations himself, and learned what the engineering phase looks like from the other end — standing on a platform, tools in hand, watching what actually happens when a design meets reality.
Today he leads a team of four or five handling tenders and pre-sales at Axians, while continuing to manage projects from award through to end of warranty. His network, built over nearly a decade, spans vendors, EPC contractors, and end user companies across Europe and beyond.
Axians sits within Vinci Energies, which sits within the Vinci Group. In Italy, Axians employs around 400 people across business units dedicated to retail, cruise ships, rail and transportation, public administration, and the enterprise and industrial sector that Simon calls home.
When Simon describes what a systems integrator actually does, he cuts through the jargon quickly.
“What really differentiates a system integrator is the ability of problem solving. We must find a solution somehow. That’s it, that’s our job.”
In practice, this means Axians’s design team — ten or more specialists, each vertical on a particular technology — works with manufacturers to select the right components, builds a custom solution for the customer, and then hands it to the project management team for execution. Networking, telephony, video surveillance, fibre optic cabling, data centres: specialists in each area work in parallel, coordinated by a project manager whose job is to get them all to the same finish line at the same time.
In oil and gas, where regulations are strict, environments are harsh, and customers are often remote, that coordination work is anything but routine.
Ask Simon what makes offshore oil and gas different from other markets, and the answer comes quickly: regulations, certifications, and consequences.
The right product has to carry the right certifications, proven through testing at the manufacturer’s own facility. Equipment placed in explosion-proof zones must be rated for those zones — a mistake on that assumption is not easily corrected once a purchase order is placed.
“If you are not experienced and you make the wrong assumption, you could be choosing the wrong product. After that, it is hard to roll back. You experience a delay — or worse.”
He also points to something less obvious: the prevalence of copy-and-paste specifications. Customers issue tenders that carry over requirements from projects done years or even decades ago, sometimes specifying legacy technology simply because no one challenged the template. One of Axians’s roles, as Simon sees it, is to push back on that — professionally, and with a better option ready.
The other distinguishing factor is global reach. Offshore installations sit wherever the oil is. Getting experienced people to a platform in West Africa or Southeast Asia, communicating clearly with multilingual crews, supporting systems across multiple time zones: these are not afterthoughts but core competencies.
Electronic mustering and Personnel-on-Board (e-POB) systems are a significant part of Simon’s project portfolio. On paper, the concept is straightforward: replace physical T-cards or paper-based roll calls with a digital system that knows, in real time, exactly who is on the installation and where.
In practice, the integration work is considerably more demanding.
Classification societies — RINA, ABS, and others — have specific requirements for how these systems must be designed, what topology they must follow, and what products are permitted in which zones. Full A+B redundancy — meaning the system must never go down under any circumstances — is increasingly specified as a hard requirement.
“Mustering is one of the few systems that is very high in the hierarchy of importance. They do periodic drills, send reports back to headquarters. If the system doesn’t work, it’s a big red flag.”
Beyond the technical specifications, Simon identifies the human transition as the most underestimated challenge. Offshore crews — often rotating every few months, often multinational — are used to physical T-card boards (see: Electronic t-card). The shift to a digital system requires genuine change management, not just training.
His most effective sales argument when facing a sceptical crew? The wristband tag.
“You have all the information you need on the screen. The effort is very, very small. And you must escape fast from the asset — that’s the selling point.”
The backend case is equally strong: no manual written reports, automatic integration with personnel management software, and a digital record that survives an audit. As Simon observes, the motivation for digitisation in offshore safety today is roughly equal parts keeping people safe and being able to demonstrate compliance to a visiting auditor (read more: Worker Safety Monitoring)
Commissioning a system is one thing. Ensuring it actually works six months later — after two crew rotations, a software update, and a support call at an inconvenient hour — is another.
Simon’s approach to change management starts with identifying the right people: the Offshore Installation Manager, the maintenance supervisor. Convince them first.
“If they are happy, then the other teams follow the instructions and they have clear guidance. Focus on a few and the right people, and then you smooth the rest by giving continuous support.”
Documentation matters enormously. Not documentation written for the engineers who built the system, but guides written for a new person who arrives on board two months after commissioning and has never seen the software before. Combined with reliable multilingual remote support across time zones, this is what sustains a system in the field.
He is candid about software bugs — they happen in every vertical, he says, without exception. What differentiates good suppliers from frustrating ones is not perfection, but responsiveness.
“I have some vendors who take three or four months to solve one bug. It’s not nice for the customer. What makes the difference is commitment from the engineering and development team to solve these issues as soon as possible, and to communicate well throughout.”
Simon has worked with many technology vendors over his career. When asked what separates a productive partnership from a frustrating one, his answer is practical and direct: responsiveness, reliability, and a willingness to share knowledge.
Quotes delivered on time during tendering. Technical support that is competent and communicates clearly with customers. Commitments that are kept. References and project experience shared openly to help build the business case together.
“I give something to you, you give something back to me. That’s the most important flow. And when I find support technicians who are always kind, who can keep their word when they get a commitment — that makes a real difference.”
In the context of e-Mustering and e-POB specifically, he also notes the cost dimension: wristband tags that are ATEX-certified yet competitively priced on a lifecycle basis matter in a world where tags get lost, damaged, and replaced repeatedly over the operational life of an installation.
Simon is measured when asked about the future. The offshore industry, he notes, is fundamentally conservative. Specifications carry legacy requirements from past projects; change moves slowly through complex procurement hierarchies. Innovation tends to enter not through standard tenders but through direct relationships with HSE departments and end user headquarters.
That said, he has seen the early signs of something genuinely new. Artificial intelligence applied to video surveillance — detecting whether a worker is wearing the correct PPE, monitoring whether the right personnel are in restricted zones. Drones conducting asset inspections and flagging potential safety issues based on trained defect recognition models.
“Manufacturers that can show some kind of AI readiness — or even small real implementations — are well seen. They can open more doors.”
But he keeps perspective. AI in offshore safety is still largely in prototype or pilot phase, adopted by specific departments with specific goals rather than embedded in standard procurement. The organisations moving fastest are those building direct relationships with end users before the tender is ever written, so that when the specification is updated, their capabilities are already part of the brief.
The deeper trend, he suggests, is simpler: data. Every audit cycle creates more demand for systems that capture, format, and present operational information in a way that a compliance team can actually use. Digital mustering and POB systems are, among other things, data infrastructure — and that is only becoming more valuable.
When asked what he would tell a young engineer considering a career in offshore systems integration, Simon does not hesitate.
“Get the hands-on experience first, then move to the design stage. When you are in the field, you learn so much just by seeing other professionals work — the procedures, the systems. You get the inspiration. And when you move into an engineering role, you put all those pieces together, and you can show that you know much more than someone who stayed only in the office.”
It is, in miniature, a description of how he built his own expertise: by being present, watching closely, and making himself useful at every stage of the process. Not the most elegant career path, he admits, but one that taught him everything the textbooks could not.
Delve deeper into one of our core topics: Personnel on board
Offshore installations are fixed or floating structures located at sea and used for activities such as oil and gas production, renewable energy generation, scientific research, and maritime operations. Examples include offshore platforms, wind turbines, subsea facilities, and floating production units. These installations are designed to withstand harsh marine environments while supporting personnel, equipment, and operational processes. They play a critical role in energy supply, resource extraction, and the development of offshore infrastructure. (2)
References:
(1) Simon Rech is Project Lead at Axians, a Vinci Group company specialising in technology systems integration across the industrial, oil and gas, transportation, and enterprise sectors in Italy and internationally. He worked together with Identec Solutions deploying their Crew Companion solution at FPSO Voyageur Spirit/Petrojarl Kong (Altera) and FSO Nordic Brasilia.
(2) El-Reedy, M. A. (2012). Offshore Structures: Design, Construction and Maintenance. Gulf Professional Publishing. ISBN: 978-0123854985. This book provides a comprehensive overview of offshore installations, their design principles, construction methods, and operational challenges.
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