Caterpillar Marine Asset Intelligence has announced a new innovative project with maintenance management specialist SpecTec focused on optimizing ship maintenance. This joint accomplishment promises to reduce ship maintenance costs by enabling unnecessary maintenance to be deferred for shipboard equipment that is operating properly and identifying potential issues for action before a failure negatively impacts operations.

By means of the integrated solution, onboard sensor data that is automatically gathered and analyzed by the Cat® Asset Intelligence onboard predictive analytics platform, can also be integrated into SpecTec’s computerized maintenance management system, AMOS. When deemed necessary – as a result of component analytics– a work order can be automatically generated requiring service either at the next convenient time, or immediately if necessary. The plan is to make this available for propulsion and other critical onboard systems for both Cat and non-Caterpillar equipment.

Any service event that is triggered by Cat Asset Intelligence component monitoring through AMOS may also be flagged to the relevant classification for inclusion in ship records. This seamless process will avoid any risk of human error and reduces administrative costs for busy seagoing engineering personnel.

“It is well-known that unnecessary maintenance can be detrimental to the long-term performance of components on board a vessel and that many failures are not strictly related to the passage of time or operating hours,” said Ken Krooner, Caterpillar Marine Asset Intelligence Technology and Operations Manager, announcing the upcoming cooperation/cooperative work with SpecTec in the week before SMM opens its doors in Hamburg. “In fact, there have been several studies that have found that up to 80% of equipment failures are not-time-based by nature and that a significant percentage of these are caused by human factors including unnecessary interventions during inspections or maintenance of components that are operating perfectly well. By implementing predictive analytics on the vessel with Cat Asset Intelligence, we are able to automatically and continuously analyze for random failures, along with degraded performance, and then notify ship’s crew immediately when those conditions begin to manifest themselves through their performance data. Furthermore, we can now automatically notify the crew, via AMOS work orders, to take action based on actual condition and help our customers transition to a more proactive operations and maintenance strategy rather than rely strictly on a time based strategy.”

“These unnecessary interventions drive added maintenance cost and the failures drive more downtime. Our cooperation with SpecTec should help make the maintenance of shipboard equipment more efficient. It could help cut costs both by preventing or deferring unnecessary maintenance for equipment that is operating correctly and identifying potential issues before catastrophic failure. It’s a win-win all round,” Krooner added.

AMOS™ is shipping’s leading maintenance management system and is in use every day on thousands of vessels. SpecTec has more than 7,000 ships set up with AMOS maintenance software on board. Progressively upgraded and refined over the years, AMOS plays a key role in maximizing shipping’s uptime by enabling effective maintenance management of today’s complex vessels with as little human intervention as possible. The computerized maintenance system dramatically reduces the risk of unexpected component breakdown, thereby improving safety at sea and minimizing the risk of damage to the environment.

Caterpillar marine power solutions are backed by the worldwide Cat dealer network with trained technicians to ensure service support is never out of reach. For more information on Caterpillar Marine, visit www.cat.com/marine.