£6.36 Million Pounds Financial Savings in Vessel Maintenance Realised by Use of Reliability-Centred Maintenance (RCM)

Way back (17 years ago) huge efficiencies were sought by the UK Ministry of Defence (MOD) within the Naval fleets that also included the commercial shipping arm of the Royal Fleet Auxiliary. The MOD contracted out a Reliability-Centred Maintenance study on a small number of Mine-Hunter vessels.

The results of the study ushered in a new era of how marine vessels were to be maintained and indeed managed operationally; RCM is not only about deterioration but also addresses failure modes attributed to Human Factors, Designed-In (Poor Design, Sub-Standard Installation and Procurement Mistakes) and Things-Have-Changed (eg Supply chain problems, Sustained deliberate and Unintentional Equipment Abuse), that are defended against when utilising RCM processes.

In 2000, some 17 years ago, the Royal Navy published details outlining the results of implementing RCM on four Hunt Class Mine-Hunters compared to identical ships operating under the pre-RCM regime. This detail showed that the complete cost of the RCM analysis of these ships was GB£2m.

The total maintenance labour cost for an 8.5 year operating cycle for each ship was projected to be about GB£6m for the RCM based-program, and about GB£8.9m for the legacy program – a saving of GB£2.9m or 33%. This corresponds to a saving of GB£340 000 per ship per year, or GB£4.1m per annum when the RCM recommendations were eventually implemented across the entire fleet.

A further saving in spares costs of GB£190 000 per ship per year (12%) was also projected, making a total reduction in maintenance costs of GB£530 000 per ship per year, or GB £6.36million per year across a fleet of twelve. An overall payback of less than 4 months, some 17 years ago.

One would consider an almost infinite supply of personnel within naval fleets to undertake such studies, however, to satisfy the commercial shipping fleets thinking, the RCM studies were actually run by outside personnel and very few persons at that but a small team of carefully selected personnel to satisfy the RCM Facilitation study.

At RELMAR®, we understand the marine environment implicitly, after all we are from seafaring backgrounds, coupled with professional engineering and business consultants who can all empathise with the Maritime and Marine Offshore Support Industry and the culture within in addition to our practical experience of RCM across a number of different industries.

DNV GL Outlook 2025 states the following:

“The adoption of a data-driven philosophy for asset operations, such as reliability-centred maintenance, lifecycle asset management, and system engineering, will therefore become even more important in the maritime industry.”

We aim to move vessel maintenance from the operational to the strategic that not only improves the corporate bottom line but indeed provides a highly robust defence against corporate litigation.