Fleet Performance Management can improve efficiency by up to 38%, but many owners are finding that FPM is costing, rather than saving money. Long-term collaboration is required to ensure a return on investment
The expectation that once you plug and play an FPM system the savings will be immediate, has set a precedent[ds_preview] that in real terms, is simply unachievable. At a time when profitability of many shipping companies is suffering, although somewhat conservative, the shipping industry is waking up to the benefits of the digital world in helping to improve efficiencies. Already we are seeing vessels being fitted with sensors and monitoring equipment, with the aim of improving operational performance and reducing maintenance costs. This is where the »digital ship« becomes part of the FPM equation.
According to a recent study by DNV GL significant financial savings of up to 25 mill. £ through FPM for container fleets was highlighted, as well as substantial environmental gains. The rewards are substantial when FPM works efficiently but FPM has not been able to fulfill ship-owners’ expectations, yet.
On the surface, FPM seems a simple proposition but the reality is very different. Ship owners need the technical expertise and dedicated vendor support to ensure that it works for them. Furthermore, FPM relies on data from a wide range of sources including the weather and existing on-board data collection tools, as well as manual inputs from crew and onshore staff. Failure to capture all this data results in an incomplete picture. Additionally, all captured data then needs to be quantified, qualified and verified. This takes time and expertise that ship owners may not have and the FPM industry’s lack of transparency deprives those ship owners of the understanding they need.
FPM should also enable ship owners to identify trends however, disparate departments and traditional working processes can hinder the implementation of performance-enhancing recommendations. All of these factors add up to disappointing outcomes for many owners and operators. Significant gains can certainly be achieved but only with time, investment and collaboration across stakeholders whith the complexities of FPM duly considered and managed effectively.
To maximize the potential savings, owners and operators need to understand the pitfalls and evaluate a range of critical considerations including:
• Objectives: What does success look like? What is your timeframe for success and what is your budget?
• Current situation: What data do you have and what are you doing with it? What do you measure and what else could you be measuring? How do you apply learnings across the fleet?
• Fleet: What is the make-up of your fleet? Do you have sister vessels that you can apply learnings to? Do you have vessels that are on charter?
• Data: How will you collect data? How will it be aggregated and validated? How will you enhance and maintain your data’s value? How secure is it?
• Hardware: What hardware will you need to collect data? Can it collect the data required to meet your objectives? Is it compatible with other systems and how will you maintain it?
• Insight: How will you turn your data into insight? How will you apply these insights to your fleet and how will you action these insights?
• Behavioural changes: How will you turn insights into actionable changes? How will you predict changes affecting planned maintenance? How will you make change happen?
• Management: Who will manage your FPM? How will this impact their day-to-day activity? Do you have the internal expertise you need? How do you take advantage of the latest thinking?
As the capabilities and sophistication of FPM continues to grow, so too do the complexities and ship owners and operators are quickly recognizing that increasing in-house skills is becoming prohibitively expensive and time consuming. For the industry, it is about how you first introduce fleet-wide performance management and then deliver the outcomes required by the customer. From agreeing a goal with the customers’ board and designing reports via cost savings analysis, through to comparative vessel performance reporting, as well as optimizing the placement of sensors on board to give the best quality data.
Peter Mantel, Managing Director, BMT SMART
