Wireline Spring 2018

Supply Chain | Knowledge Transfer

I t might take some imagination to draw immediate parallels between outer space exploration and working offshore in the North Sea. But the teams at global project, engineering and technical services company – Wood – and the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) could see the connections and opportunities to cross-pollinate ideas. “What they were doing on the space station was not that different to the challenges we had working offshore in the North Sea or in remote locations such as Alaska and Iraq,” says Bob MacDonald, CEO of Wood’s Specialist Technical Solutions (STS) business. He describes the interaction with NASA as a “spark” that ignited a new approach within Wood. While NASA wanted to find out more about Wood’s progressive approach to safety leadership, Wood saw potential to take learnings from NASA’s management of maintenance and repair on the International Space Station. Although space wasn’t the final frontier for the eWorking programme that was subsequently spawned at Wood to support safety and efficiency, the origins of the real-time worksite- to-office collaboration initiative were inspired by NASA nearly three years ago. > a

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What they were doing on the space station was not that different to the challenges we had working offshore in the North Sea or in remote locations such as Alaska and Iraq.

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SPRING 2018 | 3 1

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