Background
Founded in 1958, Starboard Cruise Services has been the pioneer in the cruise retail industry. Since 2000, Starboard has been part of LVMH Moët Hennessy • Louis Vuitton, Inc., the world’s leading luxury brand group. Headquartered in Miami Florida, Starboard employs 1,800+ shipboard team members aboard more than 100 cruise ships worldwide, representing ten cruise lines.
Starboard has been using OneView since 2018. This People Management Software as a Service (SaaS) ensures the business has the right people in the right place at the right time.
We sat down to chat with Starboard’s Workforce Planning Manager, Robert Alderman and Senior Workforce Planning Specialist Kristy Arboleda about their experiences using OneView and working with the team during both difficult times and times of growth.
Why do you use OneView?
Robert Alderman: Things have definitely changed since I started working in this industry. The ships are far bigger than they were back then, and the technology side is very different. The retail offering is also very different from what it was 25 years ago.
It’s an industry that you’ve got to keep pace with as it’s constantly changing and you have to keep a competitive edge. The scheduling systems evolved over time- from the use of little cards in a filing cabinet with everybody’s names on to excel spreadsheets. When scheduling systems became available, we started using them. We made the initial systems work, but they weren’t really intended as a scheduling system for shipboard– they were primarily used to run our financial and warehouse team schedules, so, we were kind of an add-on. It just wasn’t very useful or very user-friendly; it was time-consuming, people outside of the immediate scheduling team had trouble reading it, and there are other partners within our building that needed to have visibility to certain aspects of the scheduling program.
We realized that there were better tools out there so we did some research and came across OneView.
Kristy Arboleda: Having the ability to access the system anywhere, even on the ships, is one of the other advantages. Being a cloud-based system is better than having it all in one database, we can keep operating from anywhere. I think OneView is great; being able to filter the timeline view or what I call the ‘diary view’ and see where your true needs are.
The ships are huge so OneView helps tremendously; I’ve used similar programs which didn’t have the visuals, so I appreciate the diary timeline view. I enjoy the fact that we can filter it; it’s fun, I say fun because when I can see something that makes the job more efficient, I enjoy it. I think OneView has a lot of that.
How did OneView help you during the Pandemic?
Robert Alderman: Setting up an entire industry again, albeit it was fairly slow at the beginning, was a big challenge; bringing back 1500 staff, we also had to start a massive recruitment program which we got through and fortunately, we were back to full staff. Thank goodness we have a robust system to manage that. Now that we’ve got the ship’s back, fully staffed, our next challenge – which OneView will help with – is going to be ensuring we have the right talent on board with the right balance of languages, nationalities, and skills.
“One thing that I love is that OneView is probably the only program I’ve ever worked in for scheduling that has a drag-and-drop feature, which saves time when we’re uploading the documents for data entry. We can talk about the hours of timesaving it offers. Drag and drop really is an awesome feature that we use a lot.”
Kristy Arboleda
Workplace Planning Specialist, Starboard Cruise Services
