IMO Ballast Water Exchange and Performance Standards

In order to reduce damage from aquatic invasive species the International Maritime Organization (IMO) developed the â€Å"International Convention for the Control and Management of Ships Ballast Water and Sediments†. The BWM convention began with the IMO’s Marine Environment Protection Committee (MEPC) in 1991. Since then there have been many revisions. Some of these revisions were driven by advancing technology to remove unwanted organisms at flow rates that would not severely impact operations. Treatment of ballast water with the latest technology can meet standards at a rate of 2500 cubic meters (660,430 US Gallons) per hour. A large vessel may still take several hours per exchange to flush her ballast tanks at this rate. Flow rates and energy consumption must be acceptable to operators while producing no harmful effects on the environment. Ballast Water Standards There are two types of ballast water standards in the convention. Their differences are significant and they should not be directly compared. The first, Ballast Water Exchange, is based on specified distances and depths where a vessel may discharge. Ballast Water Performance is a standard based on the number of viable organisms allowed per unit of treated water. Some areas are instituting standards which exceed the IMO guidelines. Both California and the Great Lakes region of the United States have adopted stringent local guidelines. The US is one of many major shipping nations that have not signed the convention. Thirty nations who have a combined merchant gross tonnage of thirty-five percent of the global tonnage are needed to ratify the convention. Ballast Water Exchange The standard for ballast water exchange is fairly simple. A vessel must discharge foreign ballasts at a specified distance from shore and at a specified depth using a submerged discharge device. Regulation B-4 and D-1 of the BWM convention gives us the specifics. Exchange may take place 200 Nautical Miles (NM) from shore at a depth of 200 meters. If that is not possible for safety or other reasons then a vessel may use the next procedure.If neither of these scenarios is possible then a vessel may exchange â€Å"in an area designated by the port state†. While undertaking ballast water exchange a port state must not cause deviation or delay of a ship.Efficiency of exchange should be at least 95% of volume and must be repeated three times. Vessels which demonstrate high-efficiency exchanges may reduce the number of exchange cycles.Ballast Water Exchange should only be undertaken when the safety of the vessel and crew are guaranteed. Ballast Water Performance In the case of Ballast Water Exchange, ship operators are flushing untreated ballast out of the tanks. This is a practical if not perfect way of allowing older vessels to operate without the expense and logistical problems of ballast water treatment retrofits. New and retrofitted vessels are much less likely to transport unwanted species because the ballast water treatment systems eliminate a large proportion of the viable organisms from the ballast tanks before discharge. Systems like these significantly reduce the chances of unwanted species being introduced by inefficient exchange practices or in the event of an untreated near shore discharge for safety reasons. The IMO uses the following guidelines for the Ballast Water Exchange standard in regulation D-2. Ballast water must contain less than 10 viable organisms which are greater than or equal to 50 microns in size per cubic meter (264 US Gallons). For reference, 50 microns is about half the thickness of an average human hair.In addition, ballast water must contain less than 10 viable organisms that are less than 50 microns but greater than or equal to 10 microns per milliliter (1/1000th of a liter).Indicator Microbes may not exceed the following amounts; Vibrio Cholerae - less than 1 CFU (colony forming unit) per 100 Ml, E. Coli – less than 250 CFU per 100Ml, Enterococci – less than 100 CFU per 100Ml. Water treated to this standard is considered pure enough to discharge in most ports. These steps to re-mediate ballast water are only effective in the removal of unwanted organisms. It is still possible to carry toxins like copper and heavy metals often found in ports to other destinations in ballast water and these pollutants may concentrate in ballast tank sediment. Radioactive substances can also be transported in ballast but any serious cases would likely be found quickly by monitoring personnel.

The Fall Of Singapore And The Malaya Campaign - 1420 Words

The events of World War Two such as the failed Malaya campaign, the fall of Singapore, the bombing of Pearl Harbour and the stretched resources of Britain, led to Australia developing a more independent foreign policy however, independent of Britain. The changing of alliance between Britain, Australia and the United States of America has led to a substantial impact on shaping Australian society and where Australia are today. The fall of Singapore and the Malaya campaign brought the war extremely close to Australia even reaching Australian soil for the first time and generated new opinions and perspectives on the war for all Australians. Furthermore, with its greatest military defeat of all time, Britain had to recover and Australia had to†¦show more content†¦208). This led to the fall of Singapore which lasted from 8th-15th February 1942, which resulted in the surrender of all British and Empire forces in Singapore. This horrific event caused many Australians to fear for th e safety of the nation. A well-known newspaper at the time wrote: â€Å"Australia sent her best men and some of her equipment now sorely needed at home to relieve British needs elsewhere †¦ the United Kingdom turned deaf ears to every plea.† (‘The Fall of Singapore’ 1942, The Canberra Times) This article indicates Britain couldn’t provide assistance for Australia which was under threat by the Japanese despite Australia supplying its available resources to Britain which was in a desperate struggle to win against Nazi Germany (Mason, 2014 pg. 200). This was a significant issue for Australia as they saw Britain as their protector within Asia and counted on their strong military force which was weak in the Pacific due to the fall of Singapore as they were no longer able to use Singapore as a place for communication and supplies. This cartoon from the Daily Telegraph created towards the end of the fall of Singapore, corroborates with the newspaper quote above: Mahony, 1942, Daily Telegraph. This cartoon emphasises the relationship between Winston Churchill the British Prime Minister (Left) and the Australian Prime Minister John Curtin (Right). The

Real Workplace Communication Situation-Free-Samples for Students

Question: Identify a real workplace communication situation that requires, or required, the production of a written text. If you have workplace experience, this could be a situation in which you were (or are) incloved (not necessarily as a writer). If you have not had relevant workplace experience. Answer: Introduction: The purpose of a written assignment is to send a message to the recipient with an intention of that person reading it, understanding the message and thereby responding to it. If the purpose of the written communication is not achieved, the important information will not be understood which can thereby result in a particular outcome not being achieved and even to sever loss. The assignment will mainly comprise on two important parts. It will first consist of a rhetorical survey which will mainly be pointing out the mistakes made during the written communication and the issues that arise out of it. The second part will mainly comprise of the recommendations that should be provided to the writer so that similar incidences do not occur in the future. Rhetoric survey: The situation took place when I was a project leader in my internship months in XYZ Company. I had a team of ten members whom I used to meet every morning before beginning the day at office and distribute that days work by pointing out their names and assigning their duties. On the particular morning, I had to take day off and for that the duty was assigned to another project leader who was a working in a separate branch in other part of the city. Instead of talking with my teammates, he chose to write a mail to the team, assigning them of their duties. The triggering event took place when the new project lead sent a very long mail with a large number of details of the work they had to conduct those them. Not only that, it was found that the job segmentation that I used to do for my teammates were not done properly. A huge list of work was noted down and that too was down in a clumsy manner. It was very long mail and the important information was scattered all throughout. Moreover in place of sending the assigned duties to each member, it was sent to a single member of the team in a strict tone which affected the emotions of the workers and was asked to circulate. The actor identified in the event was the project leader of the other branch and my teammates. The primary audience was the member of the team who got the mail from the other project lead. The secondary audience was the other nine members of the team whom the first member would be circulating the information. Additional secondary audience may be those members whom my team members would approach to complete the assigned tasks like the consumers, or the store heads, franchise heads, accountants, other managers and others. The primary goal of the mail was to make the team members work together for making the every stakeholder aware of the new products which are being launched for limited edition for the Christmas sales. The project lead was to assign different duties to different members where one of them would be handling the meetings with the accounts departments, the other two team members would be working on the data collections and sales figures of the products sold in the last week, another who would be tackling the meetings with franchise holders who would be described about the new products and services which the company is launching and others. However, instead of assigning different members of different duties, he wrote a mail clumsily of the activities to be done. He wrote a very long mail where the information was lost and he did not refer to any members while writing the mail. Audience dynamics was not achieved as the project lead could not successfully convey the message properly and the entire incident did not have a proper outcome. The tone of the email was highly strict and affected the go of the team members. The informal environment in maintain in my team made them feel that the new project lead was unnecessarily strict and demanding. The email could not help them understand their job role and they were not able to understand how to proceed with the work individually. The main information was not being able to be adopted by the members in their work as they were not getting their role clarity. The team members were quite uncomfortable with their project lead as the communication happened from another office and they had never seen the project lead before. Therefore they were quite concerned about how the new project lead would react about their inefficiency to follow his instructions. Therefore, out of fear to lose their self esteem and make them look inefficient in front of those project leaders, they responded with a mail where they misinformed him that they had entirely understood the entire work and the work would be completed within time. Critical reflection and recommendations: Written communication needs to be followed by a number of rules to make the information reach the recipient properly. Reaching the information is not enough as the information should be written in way so that it can be properly understood, ever information followed and the main points are properly noted (Holtbrugge et al. 2013). The first problem found in the mail was found that it was unnecessarily clumsy. Researchers are of the opinion that when certain instructions of works needed to be given to recipients, it should be done in the form of bullets. Human brains can process the latter in better ways than a long page of information written in scattered ways (Bergila et al., 2013). Secondly, the project lead knew that it is a team of ten members who are interns and are not much experienced. Researchers therefore also say that, the sender should rightly address the recipient properly so that they can understand what was expected from them (Argenti, 2015). If the work was properly segregated and separately mailed to the team members or even if the mail was written with separate members being mentioned about their work proper outcomes would have taken place (Grace et al., 2015). The third issue which was also noticed was the tone of the mail. As the project lead was given the work of assigning jobs to the team members, he should have first introduced himself in the mail with informal tone before directly entering into responsibility of assigning works. The tone of the mail seemed to be highly strict for the team members. Therefore they could not gather courage to mail him back for reconfirmation or clarifying any issues that they were facing (Bovee, Thill Raina, 2016). Rather, out of fear, they responded with a positive reply which actually resulted in miscommunication issue. The work outcomes were not achieved and it led to loss of productivity for the entire team. Conclusion: From the entire scenario, it was seen that an improper email resulted not only affecting the morale of the employees and made them confused about their role but resulted in complete loss of the productivity of the team. Therefore every working professional should develop proper communication skills so that different issues can be avoided and productivity is not hampered. References: Argenti, P. A. (2015).Corporate communication. McGraw-Hill Higher Education. Bargiela-Chiappini, F., Nickerson, C., Planken, B. (2013). What is business discourse?. InBusiness Discourse(pp. 3-44). Palgrave Macmillan, London. Bovee, C. L., Thill, J. V., Raina, R. L. (2016).Business communication today. Pearson Education India. Grace, A., Kemp, N., Martin, F. H., Parrila, R. (2015). Undergraduates attitudes to text messaging language use and intrusions of textisms into formal writing.new media society,17(5), 792-809. Holtbrgge, D., Weldon, A., Rogers, H. (2013). Cultural determinants of email communication styles.International Journal of Cross Cultural Management,13(1), 89-110

Enterprises free essay sample

The budding entrepreneur Sam Marcus along with investor Mr. Walter saw the potential of dynamic growth in Mike’s cabinet making company and purchased a small 25 year old cabinet-making company from its founder 2 year earlier. The company competed in basically two segments, commercial and residential construction markets. Sam envisioned the company to grow to 70 Million in sales by 2007. Though commercial market offered the growth opportunity, the operating cycles were rigid because of bidding process which only has 32 % success ratio. On the other hand, the residential market was small but has the ‘got’ ratio of 70 %. The case raised many interesting facts about the value of the customer for an organization perspective. Blackstone being the biggest customer offered annual sales of about 2. 4 % to CMR, but does this relationship offered any value add to the CMR? In the end Sam Marcus must decide whether to continue this relationship without increasing prices or to increase prices thereby threatening a relationship with CMR’s biggest customer. We will write a custom essay sample on Enterprises or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Relationship with Blackstone: Clearly, initiating a relationship with the Blackstone was a complete strategic fit for the CMR enterprises. CMR wanted to increase its revenue 10 times in coming 10 years by creating a scalable and replicable business model. Blackstone will not only offer CMR high volume of sales but also will give them the strong foothold in the residential market share. More so, with aggressive growth strategy in mind, alliance with the Blackstone will gave CMR an opportunity to standardize its business processes in order to benefit from improved operational efficiencies that comes because of scale of operations. The following calculation specifies quantitative value of relationship of black stone for CMR enterprises. Blackstone contribution towards the CMR for year 1998 Fiscal year 1998 | Revenue| Total Residential | 1596000| Blackstone Contribution| 210314| % of contribution in Residential Segment | 13. 17757| Es CM | 65,344| Though the contribution of the sales given by Blackstone does give a positive contribution margin to the business of $ 65344, but with reference to the detailed calculation mention in the exhibit1, the relationship does hurt the CMR bottom line once the SGamp;A costs were taken into account. The overall effect was negative 3,444 which clearly mean that CMR has lost money on this account. Clearly I believe this wasn’t the case when Sam decided to initiate the relationship with Blackstone. So what went wrong and where for CMR? CMR relationship with Blackstone deteriorated over time because of the multiple implementation difficulties that arises over time. CMR was not able to garner the operational efficiencies which they thought they would be achieving, like for example, homeowners were still visiting showrooms of CMR for which CMR has to have a salesperson available in stores to serve them. Secondly, neither CMR and nor Blackstone was able to limit the involvement of the homeowners in the design phase, which again costs money to CMR. Also, as homeowners were working with many other sub-contractors, it created a project –coordination problem for both CMR and Blackstone, resulting in last minute design changes. Such changes entail last minute workings on manufacturing process and often results in loss of material and increases shop floor time etc. Hence I believe, because of the above mentioned reason, there exists a gap between the budgeted shop floor hours and the actual shop floor hours put in on the job. CMR will be right because they can justify the price increase but from the Blackstone perspective, any increase in price might results in non-conformance of the agreement that existed between CMR and Blackstone. Subsequent to my understanding of the above mentioned problems, mentioned below are some of my recommendations that can help CMR in improving the overall customer value chain. Improve the Operational Efficiency on the shop floor: As evident from the data, CMR was clearly not doing a good job in budgeting shop floor hours put in on the Job. It will be tough to believe that much of 69 % of unfavorable variance shown in exhibit 6 of case can be explained by above mentioned problems. Therefore, my hunch is that either the Project Managers/Design engineers were not making right assumptions about a particular job or it is the workforce who is putting inflated numbers on the shop floor time spent on one particular job. In both the cases, it is project manager’s job to improve the operational efficiency in order to reduce the difference between the actual and the budgeted hours. As evident from the calculation mentioned in the attached exhibit1 , if the revenues are to be calculated only using budgeted hours which means only the budged hours are spent on the Job , CMR can get the positive 16% value add on its EBIT / Revenues. Price based on Actual shop floor hours spent in the Job : Going forward, CMR can change its strategy and can start charging based on actual time spent on the job but such a strategy entails a risk that it will open up their margins to Blackstone which again can beat the prices down. This is the price increase option, but the price increase can be justified to the Blackstone management. Based on my calculation In Exhibit1 (If priced right Colum), using such a strategy will again bring positive contribution margin to CMR enterprises. Improve project coordination: As much of the problems results from poor project coordination, having a strong agreement in place will give both CMR and Blackstone an advantage if the other party fails to deliver on its promise. I recommend the penalty clause in the agreement if any party fails to deliver on its promises. CMR should make the agreement more strong like limiting the no of changes, requiring sufficient time to make changes, and pre budget approvals before initiating any change on the job. Similarly from Blackstone perspective, they can penalize CMR on late delivery or wrongful delivery, qualities issue, etc. By having a risk and reward relationship, the project coordination problems can be improved. CMR can selectively outsource some Jobs to different contractor: If CMR can’t bring in operational efficiency into their company on certain jobs or in fact as a whole, what they can do is to hire a subcontractor who can do the job for them in much less price. Rather than losing a complete business with Blackstone, what they can do is to pick and choose which project they would want to do and leave the rest for their subcontractors. This way they can really optimize their efforts and any risks associated with poor jobs get transferred to other sub-contractors. Increase the Prices: If CMR thinks they are right and believes that their price doesn’t justify the amount of work needed on the particular job, they can go ahead and increase their prices up to the minimum whereby they can make the positive return. As mentioned in the case, the market will follow sooner than later.