What ENL needed to achieve

ENL's needs operate on two levels: the day-to-day job of getting each project crewed and ready, and the higher job of running the business on trustworthy data fast enough to grow.

A single, reliable source of truth. Moving off Excel captured the data — but the deeper need was making that data dependable: accurate, and captured fast enough to run payroll and decisions on, rather than reconciled by hand after the fact.

Decision velocity. Leadership needed trusted data turned into judgment quickly — a centralized, data-driven picture available in time to act, so the business could grow bigger and faster instead of waiting days for a hand-built summary.

When ENL wins a new commission from a major client, the project must be made ready across several fronts — vessels, procurement, crew, and documentation. Because vessel types differ, each vessel calls for a different crew composition, and the crewing team owns the manpower plan for each incoming project — assigning existing crew who fit the project's criteria, and requesting additional manpower from HR where gaps remain.

The challenge

Before working with Delos, ENL ran its entire crewing operation on Microsoft Excel. At the scale of hundreds of crew, manual inefficiencies compounded and began to cap what the business could do.

Company. Data was scattered across many disconnected files, and the operational size forced those files to be split among different people on the HR team. Producing an executive summary meant reconciling all of it by hand — a task that took days or weeks.

Directors. Executives were frustrated that teams were absorbed by low-value tasks instead of the initiatives that mattered. They concluded that decisions needed to be faster and more data-driven — through a centralized source of truth — if the business was to grow bigger and faster.

Head of HR & Crewing. Reporting to the directors was almost impossible: each process carried its own operational overhead and could span many steps end to end, so a clear, timely picture was hard to assemble.

Crewing staff. Finding suitable crew for future projects was slow and manual. Crew profiles, certifications, and current assignments lived in separate spreadsheets, so identifying qualified, available, document-valid candidates meant cross-referencing files by hand. Duplicated data entry meant the underlying numbers were hard to trust, and slow, manual timesheet consolidation delayed payroll — a direct hit to crew confidence.

Underneath all of it sat a reliability risk the business could least afford: with certifications tracked by hand across more than 10 documents per crew member, a single expired certificate could surface mid-charter — not merely an administrative slip, but a threat to the project and to ENL's standing as a dependable offshore vendor, which is precisely what wins and grows commissions.

The tipping point. The decision to build didn't come from a single breakdown — it came from a pattern. Deficiencies in project manpower planning were real, but they surfaced too late to correct cleanly, and each late discovery rippled downstream through crewing operations. The deeper problem with Excel wasn't only that it was slow — it was that problems stayed hidden until they had already compounded.