Today's Shipping Industry Challenges

A lean crew, tight profit margins and increased competitive pressures have ship owners seeking new ways to maximise their tight maintenance budgets and increase the effectiveness of their maintenance regime. In the area of maintenance, leading-shipowners and operators are expanding programs like asset management and reliability-centred maintenance and are using condition-based monitoring tools to monitor equipment health to reduce unexpected downtime.

The shipping industry typically employs a more traditional approach to maintenance not dissimilar to a land based approach of 20 years ago. The shipping industry has now started to recognise the impact on the bottom line.

The Opportunity

Shipping has a number of opportunities when implementing the Condition Monitoring activity on rotating machinery. Traditional class requirements of the ship can require that the machine should be opened according to operation hours, even if it is in good condition. Considering that an estimated 70% of equipment failures are a direct result of intrusive maintenance this is something that should be avoided if possible.

Maintenance is viewed by most decision makers as a necessary evil. The impact that maintenance can have on profit is often lost in the numbers. Doing the right maintenance at the right time rather than just operating a calendar based maintenance regime can have significant positive impact on profit for a shipping company.

By maintaining the value of the assets the vessel can be used for a longer period even after the investment is written off. This is a very profitable period for the ship and the return on investment can be optimised.

Classification Societies and Condition Monitoring

Classification societies have now recognised the potential for reliability based maintenance approach and have started to adapt their requirements and introduce a Condition Monitoring Notation alongside the traditional planned maintenance requirements. Lloyds Register, ABS, DNV, BV and Germanischer Lloyd have all adopted this approach, and shipowners are now starting to see the value.

All of the Classification bodies above interpret in slightly different ways but the theme is common. They all provide general guidelines on which equipment should be measured, how it should be measured and how often. The advantage is that the maintenance work can be planned according to actual condition and as a result the reliability of that machine increases.

Instead of inspection and opening up equipment Class societies will increasingly accept, trending of vibration, performance monitoring and evidence of other non intrusive condition monitoring methods as the basis for inspection and survey. The unnecessary work of opening good machines can be avoided, labour costs and spare part consumption goes down.