Technology Innovation

– Planned Maintenance Systems by Ashok Patra

Dear Reader,

The core objective of Planned Maintenance as a function lies in ensuring our maintenance platform is compliant to OEM recommendations, statutory & regulatory requirements, and MT procedures to drive our repair and maintenance strategy. With Maersk Tankers transformation from a traditional tanker company to a service provider, there will be requirements from new Owners that we may have to additionally comply with going forward.

However, in our long history of creating maintenance plans from external sources for our new vessels or migrating them from previous owner’s data for secondhand tonnages, the data quality and compliance have not strictly been adhered to.

Another significant perspective worth mentioning here is regarding our application Shipnet that many of us tend to miss out. It is designed on a fleet-ship model, so changes made to any machinery maintenance plans or spare parts also require attention to where that machinery is applicable in our entire fleet.

Combining the two perspectives holistically, it certainly complicates the challenges. We can relate it to “The Butterfly Effect” – the idea that small things can have non-linear impact on a complex system. The concept is imagined with a butterfly flapping its wings and causing a typhoon.

Nevertheless, Maersk Tankers is known to solve problems.

And hence, a new in-house team based out of Mumbai was finalised in late 2020. The team has a mixed skillset of colleagues from Marine, Mechanical & IT engineering and brings together rich experience of creating PMS for various sectors of Shipping industry.

A detailed PMS Org structure can be seen below.

“Data is the new Oil” was coined back in 2006. The concept is just like oil, raw data isn’t valuable in and of itself, but the value is created when it is gathered completely and accurately, connected to other relevant data in a timely manner. Optimizing maintenance for our fleet also requires capturing data from various events i.e. docking, performance, defects etc.

All this data is essential in driving effective operational decisions.

From PMS perspective, the starting point is and remains to ensure we have an accurate and compliant maintenance platform. With an internal target of March 2022, a glimpse of our machinery wise approach can be seen in the flowchart here.

I sincerely appreciate the prompt responses from all vessels, despite your busy schedules, to the survey sheets and engagement to follow-up questions (a lot of questions actually!) we have been bombarding you all with off late. I would also like to extend my gratitude to colleagues from Fleet technology, Fleet Group Management and Electrical for continuous support in driving this

project.

Looking ahead, capturing an optimized data and connecting with all relevant elements of maintenance i.e. planned and unplanned maintenance, dockings, performances etc certainly makes way for more data driven & valueadded initiatives.

This is a journey and PMS Optimization is just the beginning!