Norvic Shipping prides itself on the breadth and depth of experience of its senior team. In this series, we find out more about their careers, roles and interests.
The leadership team’s vision to establish Norvic as one of the world’s most progressive dry bulk companies inspired Captain Nitin Jadhav to join the organization as Director of Global Port Operations in early 2023. He discusses his part in helping the company achieve its ambitious goal.
When and why did you join Norvic?
I joined Norvic in January 2023 after meeting our chairman, AJ Rahman, where we discussed his vision for the company and how I could contribute to the organization’s growth. I saw an opportunity to use my port operations experience to support the leadership team in making Norvic one of the world’s most progressive dry bulk operators.
How do you plan to establish Norvic as a progressive dry bulk company?
We handle about 130–150 ships at any time; the vision is to put structures and processes in place that allow us to support anywhere between 200–300 ships. Operating at that volume, with so many ships calling at so many ports, we need an effective framework in place. We also need to leverage our relationships with port authorities, agents, and surveyors so our colleagues working at the ports can work with them to ensure everything runs as smoothly as possible.
How are you keeping pace with changes across the sector?
Standardization is key, particularly for how we work with vendors at different ports and for benchmarking their performance. Having standard processes in place also helps us to control our costs. To handle all this, we built Trident, a web-based portal that will also have a mobile app. Trident provides access to our internal database where we can manage the vendors at every port. This is controlled by the port operations team members in consultation with the operations directors. The platform allows us to provide feedback on or change our vendors, and it provides all the information that a chartering manager may need when choosing which vendors to work with.
How do you ensure the vessels you own or operate meet the latest environmental regulations?
With regulations such as CII in place and the EU ETS on its way, we need to have people with the right experience across the organization. My job is to bring it all together, working with colleagues to keep track of what’s changing in the industry and whether there will be any regulatory updates. If there are changes to environmental regulations, we have to understand what they mean for Norvic and then decide how the company will adapt. Within this, we constantly work to ensure Norvic has access to a wide breadth of fleet owners so that we can select the best vessels for our customers’ needs. Meeting regulatory requirements is one aspect but it’s also important to consider that customers are working towards their own individual environmental targets.
The next step after reviewing any regulatory updates is educating the different departments, particularly colleagues whose work will be affected by the changes. There is a conscious effort at management level, right from our chairman and the directors, that we as an organization understand the rules and adapt to them. Now that we buy ships, we have to make sure that, as owners, we are up to date, to ensure our vessels comply with the international legal requirements.
Managing port operations globally is a huge task for you, so how big is your team?
My team is growing. We have port captains in Houston and Dubai, and two more in India. We also have a master mariner in Bangladesh and a technical superintendent in Dubai. We want to hire more candidates in other regions such as West Africa and Southeast Asia, to have people in strategic locations across every time zone so that the port operations department can provide 24/7 support to the chartering and operations team members.
What are your plans for developing Norvic’s global port operations in the next 12 months?
My focus now and for the coming year is to make sure we fine-tune systems such as Trident and our processes to support Norvic’s port operations team. It’s also important to ensure any new procedures align with those of other departments within the organization.