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June 22, 2011
Electronic engineering and technology giant Siemens Industry Inc. has announced plans to open a marine service office in Houma, making it the international corporation’s third location of that kind in North America after Seattle and Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
Among its 29,000 employees worldwide, one person, service engineer Ed Grossman will work from the Houma office, said business manager David Gruzca.
Grossman was in training and unavailable for comment, but Gruzca explained that Grossman would be available to work on client vessels himself and train crews for at-sea operations.
“The workboat industry is one of the industries that we serve,” Gruzca said. “We’ve got some very good customers in the area and as part of providing better service to those customers … it became pretty obvious that Houma was the place to be.”
As a dedicated marine service location, the Houma office will offer a full range of repair and spare part services for automation, drives, motors, instrumentation controls, condition monitoring and parts audits for both on-call and service contract customers.
“There is a lot of different stuff that we can and do,” Gruzca said. “We’ll do stuff onboard the vessels [in port]. We’ll do stuff onboard the vessels when they are out at sea. It will be parts supply, repair, if something doesn’t work on the boat, doing diagnostic work to understand what it is to repair it.”
Electrical and automation items will encompass Siemens’ scope of supply on each vessel. “We’ll do work on generators, but there is also automatic voltage regulators that control the speed of the generators and we will work on those,” Gruzca said.
According to Gruzca, Houma was selected as a location because of its proximity to working Gulf Coast operations. The Louisiana marine service operation will offer technical support, software upgrades and scheduled maintenance for electrical equipment. It also monitors auxiliary systems.
“The boats that operate out of Port Fourchon go all over the world,” Gruzca said. “We’ll do work for our customers in various parts of the world, [but] it doesn’t make sense for us to send somebody from the U.S. to the coast of West Africa to do service on a vessel. So we want to get somebody local on board to do the service work. We do work for customers in other parts of the world and we will bring people into the Gulf area to do the work. We were trying to get somebody close to the customers. Most of the work goes out of Port Fourchon and we want to be able to respond quick and fast.”
Gruzca said that while Siemens is beginning with Grossman out of Houma, the intention is to grow business and be able to add employees.
An office location has not yet been selected, but should be established by early July.
Siemens Industry Inc. service engineer Ed Grossman undergoes training in Atlanta before taking on his new role as the electronic engineering company’s representative in Houma. COURTESY PHOTO
