Stolt Tankers
Envisioning Workshop Smart Maintenance
Predict your maintenance activities based on data? You have probably already intended to start with smart maintenance. Or maybe you are already working on this. Certainly, in the technical services and manufacturing industry, smart maintenance is a term that is becoming more common.
Smart Maintenance, where to start?
Predict your maintenance activities based on data? You have probably already intended to start with smart maintenance. Or maybe you are already working on this. Certainly, in the technical services and manufacturing industry, smart maintenance is a term that is becoming more common.
Smart maintenance involves optimizing maintenance processes using smart Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms and data analysis. Such projects can yield enormous benefits, but where do you start?
Smart Maintenance: Start changing your focus
Where most providers of predictive maintenance technology assume the prevention of that one fatal error, in practice these errors are very rare. Most companies for whom uptime is crucial have already vastly optimized their production chain. Preventing that one failure, which may occur once every ten years, won’t quickly recoup your investment in predictive maintenance.
Instead, we say: look further, at the indirect, perhaps ‘smaller’ effects that do deliver a high return on investment. I like to make a comparison with the tire pressure of a car. Instead of doing everything you can to prevent a blowout that might happen to you once in a lifetime, it’s better to make sure that you always drive with optimal tire pressure. That’s safer and you’ll also save a lot of fuel, and therefore money.
Smart Maintenance: Common questions
The following questions probably pop-up in your mind while you are thinking of implementing Smart Maintenance:
- How to make the shift from preventive to predictive maintenance?
- How to define the value of data?
- Is my organization ready?
- Are my customers ready?
- What are the first steps for servitization?
- What data should we collect for future use?
- How to define a business case?
- How to connect assets with IoT?
- Should we invest in new IT platform?
The huge potential of Smart Maintenance
The McKinsey 2020 AI survey shows that artificial intelligence (AI) has become a revenue driver and companies are planning to invest even more in AI the coming years. AI is not only generating revenue but also results in cost reductions. At research done by IoT Analytics also shows that Predictive Maintenance is by far the most common use case in Industrial IoT.
Benefits of Smart Maintenance
- Pay by the hour/meter
- Performance bonus
- Predict High risk events
- Condition based Maintenance
- Optimized planning and logistics
- Customer Satisfaction
- Returning customers
- Improved accuracy
- Improved quality
- Reduce waste & energy
- Utilization
Smart Maintenance: How to overcome the pilot phase?
You see the potential and you have probably already intended to start with smart maintenance but so far you don’t know how to overcome the pilot phase as it is difficult to find the right use-case or get the involvement of the right stakeholders to really benefit from the potential of AI.
- Start with use cases that can be concretely named and can be approached pragmatically
- Discover and be open minded
- Data exploration and cleaning are key
- Involve domain experts & stakeholders
- Disrupt data quality myths
- Apply an agile way of working
Smart Maintenance: HSO Approach
Big Data and AI have been hot topics for quite a while, but as is often the case: bringing them in practice is more difficult. Some organisations have been gathering data for years. However, very often, they do not have the appropriate software to interrogate data in-depth.
So how do you develop an AI business case that delivers added value for your organisation? As a result, initiatives do not lead to results, or nothing happens. HSO has developed a unique approach to help you find out exactly what the impact of AI will be in your company.
Which use cases can you start working on immediately and what will be the expected impact on your business? What do you need and what does it deliver? We translate abstract technology into concrete applications, that you can start using immediately.
Workshop Agenda: 4 sessions, 8 hours
Session 1 (150 minutes): Introduction and Background
- Facilitating Team
- Workshop objectives
- Desired outcome
Customer Current Situation
- Vision Statement or Value Hypothesis
- Existing Initiatives and Deployments Review
- Observations and Discover
- Challenges & Opportunities
Inspiration session
- Use case Inspiration & Business understanding
Session 2 (150 minutes) - Design
Business needs Ideation (Design Thinking)
- Review the homework submissions
- Leverage whiteboard to collate new ideas, benefits and pain points
- Concept Cards and initial use case definitions
Value needs Ideation
- Use case visualization and value understanding
Session 3 (120 minutes) - Concept Prioritization
- Review concepts and define use case KPI’s
- Identify top priorities & define approach
Session 4 (60 minutes) - Reporting
- Aspirational timeline Smart Maintenance PoC
- Next Steps, Actions and Owners
An example:
Corporate Objectives
· Improve operational uptime & forecasting · Enhanced risk management · Competitive advantage · Voyage management capabilities
Project deliverables
· Scope use case · AI technical architecture · Data insights and visualizations · IOT data discovery · Machine learning models for predicting engine status and failures
Benefits of business case
· Prevent 1-2% of fuel inefficiency loss · Controlled and guaranteed up-time · Cylinder liner lifetime has been extended · Active voyage management · Strategic sourcing of spare parts
“We suspected that it should be possible to make predictions of the expected failures in the engines of our tankers. With our own data team, we didn’t know how to underpin our suspicions with a working algorithm. The approach of HSO led to a concrete predictive model.“
Experiences from customers
“We are now able to prioritize maintenance on (expensive) assets to prevent downtime using asset risk scores.”
“We have never overcome the pilot phase of possible AI use cases, the Envisioning workshop from HSO helped us to streamline our ideas, plan it in time and define the next concrete steps. A well spent 8-hours!”
“The envisioning workshop completely changed our way of thinking of possible use-case. We have stopped thinking of that one fatal error that can occur, but started thinking of indirect, maybe smaller, effect that do deliver a higher return on investment in the long run.”
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