Paris MOU's Secretary General: Your SMS Is a Management Tool, Not a Compliance Binder

"Shipping Needs to Use the SMS Much More Effectively"

That's the direct assessment from Paris MOU Secretary General Luc Smulders: the Safety Management System required under the ISM Code is meant to give continuous oversight of both a vessel's crew/human resources and its actual technical condition – and on most fleets, it's still being used as a paper compliance exercise instead, dusted off for audits rather than actually driving day-to-day decisions.

The Core Message: Quality Shipping Pays Off

Smulders frames the alternative directly as "quality shipping pays off" – genuinely thorough, continuous maintenance and safety practice actually embedded in how a vessel is run, not audit-cycle theatre performed for the benefit of whoever's inspecting that week. The distinction matters because an SMS built for compliance optics and an SMS built for real oversight can look identical on paper – the difference only shows up in whether problems get caught and fixed before they become deficiencies, detentions, or worse.

Where Safety Culture Actually Comes From

Smulders' root-cause framing is specific: a robust safety culture forms when a company empowers crew to report defects early, and management ashore fixes them promptly without commercial pressure overriding the fix. Both halves have to be true. A crew that reports early into a system where nothing gets fixed learns to stop reporting. A management team that would fix things promptly, but never hears about problems until they're serious, can't act in time either way.

What This Means for You, Practically

• If you're reporting a defect and it consistently goes nowhere, that's not just frustrating – it's exactly the failure mode Paris MOU's own Secretary General is naming as the industry-wide problem.
• An SMS that only gets referenced before an audit or inspection is not doing its actual job, regardless of how compliant the paperwork looks.
• Genuine safety culture is a two-way system – your early reporting only closes the loop if it's matched by a management response that isn't overridden by schedule or cost pressure.

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