Beyond the Rig: Why KennScott Limited Is Trading Spreadsheets for a System Built to Scale
For 18 years, KennScott Limited has kept Trinidad and Tobago's offshore oil and gas workers fed, housed, and equipped to do their jobs. The company supplies catering, housekeeping, laundry, and ship chandler services to crews coming off long, physically demanding shifts at sea, describing itself as the team that builds "a home away from home."
HR Manager Lisa Prescott also serves as a director and corporate secretary, and with a workforce that flexes between 150 and a little over 200, depending on which contracts are running, she needed HR processes built to keep pace.
Davyn, Factorial's Trinidad-based partner, first connected KennScott with Factorial and stayed closely involved through onboarding, giving Lisa a trusted local contact for any question before it ever reached Factorial itself.
The challenge: One expired certificate can stop someone from going offshore
In an industry where compliance is non-negotiable, KennScott's most safety-critical records, contracts, medicals, offshore certifications, were tracked the same way as everything else: by hand, in Excel, and from memory, with no dedicated HR system at all despite 18 years in business.
That manual approach was already stretched thin as the company grew from around 100 to more than 200 employees, and it came under real strain over the last two or three years as new contracts pushed headcount up further. Contracts weren't just tracked by hand, they had to be signed by hand too, with no electronic signature option, so staff had to come into the office in person just to read and sign paperwork.
Getting one of those records wrong doesn't just cost time, it can cost someone their ability to go offshore altogether.
Expiry dates nobody could track
Contracts, medicals, and certifications like T-BOSIET all carry expiry dates staff must track to work offshore. Missing one means losing that right, as Lisa has experienced firsthand.
Paperwork for 200-plus employees, done by hand
Contracts, timekeeping, attendance, and schedules were prepared manually, split across more than a dozen spreadsheets. Simple tasks grew time-consuming, with errors easy to make and hard to catch.
Records that could disappear
Two years ago, KennScott lost a year of timekeeping and attendance data, taking two HR staff nearly three weeks to rebuild. Records split across folders made that loss one mistake away.
Systems that didn't talk to each other
Payroll ran on Micropay, but other HR systems it evaluated solved only one piece each, timekeeping here, performance there, adding logins instead of less work.
The solution: One home for every record, built to grow with the crew
A trusted recommendation brought KennScott to Factorial. Trinidad-based partner Davyn gave the company a local, familiar point of contact throughout onboarding, answering questions by email and taking the time to understand KennScott's business before Factorial ever came into it. KennScott is now moving its HR onto Factorial, starting with its five-person HR team ahead of a wider rollout to offshore staff.
Certifications, tracked automatically
Expiry dates for contracts, medicals, and offshore certifications now live in Factorial instead of memory.
Every record in one place
Profiles, contracts, and attendance for every employee now sit in one real-time system, and can be signed online.
Staying connected offshore
Birthday and anniversary reminders let Lisa reach offshore staff she rarely sees in person.
Built-in Learning Management System
Factorial's new LMS replaces a separate platform, with room to add offshore safety training.
The results: A rollout with a fixed finish line
KennScott's HR team is already running its day-to-day leave and time management inside Factorial, and has found it user-friendly once early teething issues were ironed out during onboarding. The wider rollout to offshore staff is booked for July and August, with KennScott aiming to bring a genuine, company-wide success story to its HSE meetings this September and October.
Getting there means running two systems side by side for now, but for the first time KennScott has a fixed date to retire its manual records for good, and a platform built to keep pace as the business moves between 150 and 200-plus employees with every new contract.
“We're no longer relying on someone's memory to know when an offshore certification is about to expire. For the first time, we're going to have every employee's information in one place.”
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