Gurdeep Singh Taluja, Area Technical Service Manager for the Middle East and Asia, discusses the evolution of Castrol Marine’s technical services.
In my role as Area Technical Service Manager for the Middle East and Asia, I oversee technical services in the marine and energy industries across 20 countries.
I graduated as a mechanical engineer in 1996 and then completed another year of training to move into the marine industry. I then worked as a marine engineer onboard commercial ships until 2007 when I joined Castrol in Mumbai. I have been with Castrol and bp ever since, and I am currently based in Dubai since 2011.
Over the past 26 years in the marine and energy industries, there have been many enjoyable moments. As highly social industries, it has been a great experience to interact with customers around the world at events and webinars, and to take insights from those interactions into Castrol to evolve our products and services.
On a more personal level, I feel fortunate to have been able to travel most parts of the world and had the opportunity to meet people from diverse backgrounds, experience new cultures, and tried new food. There have been opportunities to do this with work, but also with family and friends.
Whether travelling or not, every day in life presents opportunities to learn something new. This guiding mantra seamlessly embeds into my leadership style. Mentoring the team and helping them to find solutions to complex problems is another fulfilling element of my role. It is key to ensure that people have the best environment to continuously improve day-to-day working practices and to evolve our technical services by keeping the customer needs as the focal point.
Innovative technical offers are required as we prepare for the ever-changing marine and energy industries and hence I collaborate with sales, marketing and technology team to create offers and ensure customers remain fully supported at all times.
The energy transition is currently the main driver of change, and its challenges and opportunities are international. In the marine industry, the fuel landscape has been constantly changing since the implementation of MARPOL 2020 Now, with the emergence of alternative fuels and the further expansion and diversification of the fuel mix, equipment manufacturers are constantly upgrading engine designs, class societies updating requirements, regulators renewing targets and so on. This has added another dimension of complexity to the ship operating environment, which has led to an elevated role for lubricant providers and an evolution of their technical services.
There are three main pillars to Castrol Marine’s technical services – scheduling, condition monitoring and consultancy. These sit under the umbrella of SmartGains, which is our systematic approach to relentlessly pursue improvements that deliver and demonstrate measurable value of our technical service offer to our customers.
There is more data than ever available to us as we manage ship operations and onboard equipment conditions, for example through monitoring tools such as used oil analysis – but of course this is only useful if you know how to interpret the data. This is where the knowledge of our technical consultants comes in. They provide the expert lens through which to interpret the data and generate actionable insights that support sustainability objectives. And as the fuels landscape becomes more complex, this technical expertise only become more valuable.
This approach to, for example, condition monitoring now requires a blend of human expertise and marine and energy experience, as well as the latest technology such as artificial intelligence and machine learning. Whilst there is some anxiety in the industry that these technologies will reduce job opportunities, I believe they will actually increase the demand for experts to interpret the data and provide newer insights to manage vessel operations more efficiently.
Castrol has long been at the forefront by having a dedicated technical services team which helps customers daily to leverage the opportunities and mitigate the risks of the energy transition. A lot of my time is dedicated in identifying the right talent from the marine and energy industry and then groom them into lubricant specialists. With rapidly changing operating conditions, fuel types, training and broadly added complexity, these specialists are key to the future of our industries and its rewarding to see them flourish.