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Lean Maintenance Saves Money, Reduces Danger on the
High Seas

A growing number of firms are applying lean principles to an often overlooked but critical area: their maintenance operations. And in difficult or dangerous environments—such as ships at sea for weeks at a time—the lean approach not only saves money, it also helps ensure safer and more reliable maritime operations.

Sophisticated lean maintenance strategies take advantage of remote asset monitoring applications that use digital sensors to continuously evaluate the health of critical operating machinery and their related components. Continuous onboard vigilance assures that equipment runs within correct tolerances and that they’re being maintained for optimum lifespan and efficiency.

Safe Is Smart
For example, high-tolerance bearings that rotate on the driveshaft of a container ship may cost hundreds of thousand of dollars by themselves. But a high-seas repair of a failed bearing represents costs of more than US$1 million in a major overhaul in a dry-dock.

To avoid unscheduled repairs and extend the life of the internal parts, sensors used by one leading international shipping company constantly monitor dozens of critical performance measurements, including bearing-oil temperatures and the harmonics produced by the precision parts for early signs of overheating or excessive stress. If warning signals appear, the crew may decide to reduce engine RPMs or take other countermeasures to avoid a hard failure.

The Right Maintenance at the Right Time
But to make informed decisions, these warning systems don’t just bury crews in a mountain of statistics. Today’s lean-maintenance systems use business intelligence (BI) applications to compare asset readings with prevailing working conditions to account for environmental or workload factors that may produce elevated but still acceptable readings on critical equipment. These BI-enabled in-depth analyses help companies avoid over-maintaining their equipment and the unnecessary costs that result.

“The idea is to keep assets running as long as possible, to minimize downtime, and to do it all at the lowest possible cost,” says Andrew Binsley, Oracle’s senior director of strategies for manufacturing and asset lifecycle products.

What technologies do companies need to protect their physical assets with lean maintenance strategies? Oracle offers a comprehensive suite, including the Oracle Edge Sensor Server, Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, Oracle Enterprise Asset Management, and Oracle Asset Tracking software.

“Companies need to increase reliability and improve performance. The newest way to do this is through lean maintenance,” Binsley says.