The Greatest (Maritime) Story Ever Told…Maersk Drilling and GE Marine

…is unfolding before our eyes, revealed to the world like a bright star against the dark sea of night.

In the marine industry, change does not come easy. Yet, on the eve of the Smart Ship Era, 2 Kings of Industry have seen the light and have responded with a significant venture that will change the future of Asset Management at sea.

GE Marine Solutions and Maersk Drilling are paving the way for the reliability of highly complex marine machines through the harnessing of dynamic digital data and powerful analytics.

But Big Data in Maritime is not new and the sensor/algorithm symbiosis has been embedded in most ships for some time. Furthermore, connectivity to shore-side logic systems is an extension more than a revelation.

What makes this initiative exciting is the strategic change in reliability and availability thinking. The future of Marine Asset performance will no longer be driven by arbitrary maintenance practices based on isolated failure modelling, but on continuous, experiential improvement of Failure Mode Models driven by on-site sensor feedback and machine/human learning.

This is tantamount to changing religion and challenges everything Mariners accept as gospel from OEMs and Class Societies alike, at least as far as maintenance goes.

A kingly insight by RELMAR®, made 2 years ago almost to the day, predicted that the future of Smart Ship maintenance resides in classic RCM. (Link to article – Click here)

We went further still and spoke, more importantly, about how classic RCM should be implemented to benefit the digitalisation of Maritime. (Link to article – Click here)

But change brings both the birth of the new and the death of the old which the former must replace. The new kid on the block, (Marine-specific RCM as touted by RELMAR®) brings with it a change in dogma from an archaic, pre-emptive maintenance methodology to a risk-based maintenance strategy which utilises proactive, predictive, preventive and reactive techniques.

In the stoic and historically-grounded maritime culture, this change will not come easy. In the friction and unsettling that will follow, how will we manage the human elements of change? The conundrum of geographic separation between Mariners at sea and management ashore is exacerbated by contrasted work ethics, ways of living and personal priorities.

What elements of Change Management must be invoked from our past and how will we morph this into our future to pave the way for collaboration across an ocean? To place people at the heart of failure and expect success requires us to conjure up the very best from humans; a social cohesion in High Performance Teams.

The future of marine maintenance calls for the breaking down of age-old barriers and eliciting a deep sharing for the benefit of the collective cause, Asset Performance through Availability.

Despite the bright future digitalisation holds for marine innovation, there are poignant questions that beg to be answered.