How to achieve efficient IHM-Maintenance? Some indicators help detecting efficient approaches which ensure risk-free, convenient and compliant maintenance of IHMs without hidden costs
[ds_preview]What counts is how smart, thought-through and transparent the approach is for being cost-effective. Manual maintenance is not suitable, an efficient software tool combining expert knowledge with artificial intelligence is required for covering the life-cycle of ships.
Owners can use such a tool or involve service suppliers for being unburdened completely and sharing of liabilities. The process starts with basic purchasing data (ship, article, supplier, quantity shared ideally via an API) and relevant items are selected for IHM-Maintenance.
For those the suppliers are requested to provide MD and SDoC, who often need to gather information from their supply chains. Documents received are reviewed on compliance aspects. Often hazardous materials are declared even though they are excluded from the IHM-scope (e.g. soldering points, metal alloys). That creates unnecessary entries in the IHM, which impacts the asset value. Declaring presence of hazardous materials is generally rare and only those require a follow-up onboard in case of installation, relocation or removal. Such activities are to be reflected in the ship specific IHM and Maintenance Report which are subject to PSC control and re-certification at least every five years.
Ship-Supplier Interface
Suppliers face same challenges like shipowners, but are buried by unnecessary requests for non-relevant items, or order and ship specific documentation. These are indicators for non-functional approaches, which only increase costs and documentation gaps. An efficient tool for IHM-Maintenance helps suppliers for managing their documents by providing forms and guidance and overview of open requests. This allows them to directly upload documents and in case of already documented order items, the forms can simply be re-used via specification of the duration in which the documents can be used. The following provides a comparison of services provided:
Cooperative approach
A cooperative approach and professional guidance increase provision and quality of IHM-related documents. Gaps in IHM documentation and unnecessary workloads can be avoided by proper selection of order items and is the core of efficiency of IHM-Maintenance and Materials Compliance Data Exchange. Inaccurate supplier documents and IHM-Maintenance can trigger substantial penalties like fines and imprisonment in EU-Ports. It´s a serious issue and the true costs for compliance are to be compared. A proper understanding avoids selection of inappropriate approaches, which are still too common.
Authors:
Henning Gramann, GSR,
Otto Klemke, NautilusLog
