Boost your shipyard’s performance with strategic asset management

Vessel owner and stakeholder expectations are continually on the rise, and there’s huge pressure on shipyards to keep up with demand. To stay competitive, shipyards need to improve performance, limit downtime, and deliver the safest, most efficient service possible.

One area that plays an important role in your ability to deliver an exceptional service is the management of your assets and infrastructure. Good asset management will open the door to a range of new opportunities to boost your shipyard’s performance.

Many of these new opportunities will also help you capitalise on new markets and mitigate climate threats – improving your shipyard’s resilience for years to come.

Asset management and performance need to be carefully balanced

When all of your assets are critical to completing your client’s work, it can be tempting to put off maintenance and repairs. But that focus on maximising your shipyard’s short-term performance may actually come back to harm it later down the road.

Putting your time and focus into prioritising your assets and infrastructure will help keep them operational for longer.

It can be difficult to sacrifice time and revenue to take your assets offline to carry out routine maintenance. Even if you’re willing, it’s hard to find the perfect point to intervene, to anticipate issues far enough in advance to plan around them and make the most of any downtime.

But if you can avoid costly and time-consuming breakdowns, you will earn that time back many times over.

Create a clear line of sight to future opportunities

A robust asset management strategy should consider your stakeholders’ ambitions and the demands market changes and vessel trends will put on your infrastructure.

Your people’s experience is one of your most valuable tools, so when more of them have eyes on the same information you’ll increase your chances to spot opportunities to boost performance in your shipyard.

It’s important to establish clear processes for sharing knowledge, so everyone has the same view of what you have now and where you want to be, and can succeed as a team; and to provide leverage for strategic changes including digital transformation, to improve your efficiency even further.

Bring your strategic goals a step closer

Good asset management drives co-ordinated activity – making sure processes are optimised to benefit your business and your clients. For example, by optimising when you intervene to work around shifts you can reduce downtime and, by extension, maximise the number of clients you can serve.

You’ll also put yourself in a better position to demonstrate best practice in line with standards like ISO 55000.

This could start with small steps in the right direction, to avoid processes that haven’t been proven and could hurt you in the future and enable and safeguard commitments to strategic goals like automation or demonstrating your commitment to quality services.

Boost your shipyard’s performance with expert support

Our experts build on 140 years’ experience in the maritime industry, so understand the very specific needs of shipyards. Plus, we’re the first engineering consultancy in the world to have been accredited to ISO 55000.

The combination of Haskoning and First Marine International brings deep domain knowledge to every project. And our Smart Ports team can recommend the digital tools that will deliver the most impact to your shipyard – whether that’s sensor technology, automation, or our in-house digital twin software: Twinn.

You can use forecasting to take a longer view of your assets and the demands that will be placed on them in the future. This will help identify the biggest opportunities to increase your shipyard’s performance and ensure any investments you make today will be appropriate for decades to come.

And with comprehensive advice and training opportunities, you’ll be able to keep improving and succeeding long after we’ve gone.

Start your strategic asset management journey, today

Improving your asset management processes to unlock big opportunities like smarter monitoring, risk management, and climate resilience is a journey. However, you can start benefiting from reduced risk, better maintenance, and compliance very early on.

Strategic asset management will help you improve your shipyard’s performance and achieve business excellence. And embracing it will ensure you can keep delivering for your clients today, and tomorrow. If you’d like to learn more about how strategic asset management builds shipyard resilience as well as performance, check out our blog for a deep dive.

And get in touch with our expert team to start your strategic asset management journey today.