Fri, 07 February, 2020
Chee Shung Ten, who attended the CSWIP 3.4U Underwater Inspection Controller training, is a mechanical engineer from MMU University in Malacca, Malaysia.
Right after his graduation, CS joined the Jurong shipyard in Singapore as a mechanical design engineer. His job involved working with the vessels as well as piping, checking out the specifications of machinery and pipes, selecting the right size of pump and monitoring the flow, etc.
The job gave CS a lot of marine engineering knowledge but after two years of working on the shipyard, CS felt he was reaching a point where he was no longer being stimulated by new things in his job. That was when he started looking for a new challenge and found an opportunity at Proceanic Engineering Services Pte Ltd, which is an offshore engineering company.
In this new company, CS was still involved with design engineering, however the type of projects he got involved with were different from at his previous job. In his first project CS worked on FSO pipe inspection which required him to travel to offshore sites and get hands on with the projects. He needed to go out to the vessels and use NDT techniques to collect data for analysis and estimation of the life of the pipeline and the vessels themselves.
He worked on various shipyard projects, delivering design and calculations. However, things changed when the oil and gas industry was hit by the drop in the oil price. Proceanic started facing challenges and that was when the management decided to diversify the range of their services by introducing the small ROV inspection. This move had a huge impact on CS’s job, as the ROV inspection was a totally new field for him to enter and a shift from engineering to inspection.
CS started picking up the new techniques and knowledge required to work with ROV equipment from his supervisor. However, as the range of the services that Proceanic delivered expanded, he felt the need to get trained for interpretation of the data collected by the ROVs. This was when CS decided to attend TWI’s 3.4U course.
He explained how beneficial to his career it was to complete the Underwater Inspection Controller training as, by going through this course, he gained in-depth knowledge of some topics that he only used to have a very basic understanding of. This is not only going to help him better perform at his job, but is also going to benefit the company’s business as he will be able to deliver better results to his customers and gain their respect and trust.
So far, CS has worked with companies including Exxon Malaysia and Shell. In the beginning he had to learn how to operate and fix the ROV equipment. But, as time went by and he mastered the equipment, CS managed to design a new ROV with the same capabilities but at a much lower price, which could save hundreds of thousands of dollars for his company.
To learn more about TWI’s Underwater Inspection training courses.