Maritime Spare Parts Management: Current State-of-the-Art

Abstract

Having the right spare part at the right time to the right place for ship maintenance to the minimal possible costs is an exigent management problem that maritime shipping companies face. This is especially challenging in bulk shipping where routes are not fixed, but subsequent port calls depend on spot market dynamics. Thus, spare parts allocation ahead in time is limited, but possible if failures rates of ship components and their timing can be foreseen, so that spare parts can be allocated to hedge against the risk of long waiting times and thus ship downtimes. Companies are very sensitive to the latter due to significant ship operational costs that accrue also during downtime, but without revenues. Thus, reducing ship downtimes by monitoring the condition of components key to the ships performance is essential to the task. However, shipping companies seem far away from applying sophisticated methods for forecasting and planning due to various challenges ranging from data gathering and cultivating an understanding of data quality needs, adaptation to move from preventive towards predictive and condition-based maintenance (CBM) thus enabling the introduction and application of decision support tools for demand forecasting, sourcing, spare parts allocation, and inventory management. In this paper, we investigate the current state of the art of spare parts logistics (SPL) management tightly related to CBM for maritime shipping and discuss the application of methods to the bulk carriage market.

Design/Engineering For Production (DEFP) and Shipyard: A Review on the Malaysian Technological Aspects and Practices

“…According to Corporationi [8], Integration DEFP should have as its main objectives: 1) Produce a design that represents an acceptable compromise between the needs of a shipowner and a builder (Functionality versus Producibility); 2) Produce a design that exhibits characteristics consistent with the known characteristics of the shipyard facilities (Availability versus Producibility); and 3) Produce a design that facilitates the integration of equipment effort with the effort of fabricating and assembling structural steel (Integrability versus Producibility). Engineering for ship production is the use of production-orientation technique to transmit and communicate design and engineering data to various users in the shipyard [9][10].…”

“…On the other hand, according to [12], isolated engineering is the approach in which, although the design details are shown, they do not integrate any input or production decision such as block boundaries, piping flange or weld breaks, preferred details to suit production methods etc. It normally took a long time to develop the engineering and then the production planning to organize the information into a production-compatible form [9][10].…”