The president of EBEN Greece, Antonis Gortzis, organised the annual online awarding of Ethics awards on Wednesday, December 16, 2020 in live streaming.
ELVICTOR GROUP is one of the companies that was distinguished for its business ethics and was awarded the Golden Award (Ethos & Social Responsibility In The Business World)
Konstantinos Galanakis CEO of ELVICTOR GROUP mentioned in his internet speech:
“First and foremost, I would like to congratulate the coordinators of today’s event for their efforts to achieve the best technical outcome with the new manners and customs in communication, living in the era of Covid-19.
We are very honored to be members of the EBEN European Business Ethics Network and the fact that our hard work is being recognized and rewarded gives us the strength to continue to produce and provide professional and high-quality services in this sensitive Crew Management sector, against the difficulties of the times we are going through.
Thank you for being by our side, enabling us to go one step further.”
Cyprus Shipping News had the opportunity to meet online with Mr. Galanakis and he mentioned to us the following including the future plans of the Group:
ELVICTOR GROUP was established back in 1977. From the dawn of our company, our main focus has been in quality and transparency. This has led to a number of accreditations being acquired over the years, where Elvictor was at the forefront. We were the 1st Crew Manager globally with ISO 9002 in 1996, followed by another first in ILO MLC accreditation in 2010. That being said, we are striving to expand our list of ISO accreditations, focused on quality, the environment and our investment in information technology.
Elvictor is the only Greek Crew Management Company, Associated Member of EBEN GR (European Business Ethics Network Greece), INTERCARGO (The International Association of Dry Cargo Shipowners), INTERTANKO (The International Association of Independent Tanker Owners) and HELMEPA (Hellenic Marine Environment Protection Association).
As a follower of the company’s vision, I would like to stress that we are committed to both our customers and our Seafarers, as well as to all providers of vertical and parallel services. The pillars of our existence are ethics, transparency and technology, for this reason we fight against venality, all kinds of discrimination, blame culture, and we communicate all this through our technological innovations, a tool with which we manage to redefine the Crew Management operations based on current trends, along with the best practices we apply.
We are the first Crew Management and Manning company to ever be listed in any market, emphasising our ability to be a technological disruptive crew manager and at the same time learning and changing organization with a corporate structure, defined by the regulations of the capital market.
In regard to the Covid-19 outbreak and based on my personal posts on social media, we were the first company in Shipping nationwide, which acted cautiously with our employees working from home, from the first week of March 2020 and for a period of about three months.
At that time, all the innovations of our IT and CLOUD systems were utilized, while at the same time new ideas were born, new KPIs and Control Engines for the new era of remote working.
The results showed that our innovations, integration and interaction between users brought about work quality, a ‘weapon’ for our future rise in the event of multiple recruitments.
Our technology and the infrastructure we have created are based on the best cloud technologies with supreme GDPR compliance tools embedded, being together with cyber security our competitive advantages.
We have our own data centre and most of our clients interact this way with our branch/affiliate offices around the world, resulting in reduced bureaucracy/e-mails exchange, improving at the same time the budget of both parties.
The intranets we have for the Shipowners, Administrators and Seafarers are cloud audited 24/7, transparent, with log files and documented evidence of each process and operation. Finally, there are special mechanisms for a Whistleblowing system, which is above the minimum requirements of both the Stock Exchange and the classification societies, so that all members of our ecosystem can have direct access to the CEO and the Chairman of the company ensuring compliance with procedures.
At last, as a listed company we have internal and external financial audits, as well as quality audits, something which we have expanded on a monthly basis.
“Currently we are working on a research and development project, to apply Artificial Intelligence through the use of machine learning and deep learning, to our cloud ecosystem.”
We name it “Three Aces” because we are testing 111 (a hundred eleven) APIs (application programming interfaces) of AI for Semantics, in order the business intelligence and artificial intelligence tools to gather from our seafarers, clients and branches the “big data” and develop “personality traits” of our candidates and applicants but also our seafarers, based on their skills, experience, training, appraisals, briefing and debriefing information, vetting experience, port experience, etc.
Parallel the APIs we test are for identification of signatures, stamps and varying objects, for automated authentication of the certificates and documents provided to us by various candidates. — we have applied many of these already—. At the same time ICR (intelligent character recognition) and Image processing tools would be used for machine learning, in order the system to identify types of certification e.g. COC (Certificate of Competency), from which nationality this COC is (Philippines, Russia, Georgia and other 10 nationalities we work at Elvictor), or from which training center and grasp the data and inject the data automatically into the system and file the scanned, without any human interaction. This tunes our procedures to gain time in processing numerous applications but also assist us concerning authenticity and validation to be done automatically and accurately, without the risk of any human error. This also provides a faster service for an applicant and thus candidate-response and tunes the process of recruitment and secures various sub procedures and automates the most that are done manually.
At last, we are applying bots to our ecosystem that based on all the above APIs and even with APIs that have to do with lemmatization, hashtag, summary, and other intelligence tools, will assist like a “virtual crew manager operator” every single seafarer for applying, requesting information, assisting in the application, notifying him of the process of his application and many more things, giving a seafarer excellent experience. The same applies with the bots to our customers and to our people in our network offices.
We believe that with the use of AI tools through the APIs we have selected will tune our ecosystem and transform it to a “living organism” with automated procedures and diminishing human errors, providing ever growing user experience and optimize our economies of scale as time passes. Remote work thus could become easier and is one of our future projects to allow many of our personnel to work from home, even with or no pandemic scenarios, mostly dedicated to the mothers that should be next to their kids.
