Management aspects on Condition Based Maintenance – the new opportunity for maritime industry

The maritime industry is in many aspects using maintenance strategies from the past. Land based industry used to take influence from shipping to organise the maintenance in the 70:ties. Now industry is perusing new strategies that give better reliability and are more profitable. By focusing on reliability the indirect effects from doing the wrong maintenance can be reduced considerably. Shipping industry has from a maintenance aspect been doing the wrong things correct for many years. The opportunity is now to do the right thing correct instead. The traditional economical tool of a cost budget for each individual part of the organisation does not show the effect on the profit that maintenance has. The profit is there to take but invisible to the decision makers. 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. Concordia is one shipping company that have oil tankers. They put additional professional maintenance staff onboard and save millions of dollars per ship by doing this. The increased reliability improves the just-in-time docking, gives less spare part consumption and a longer production life of the vessel. The labour cost is higher but the positive effect on the profit