Build shipyard resilience with strategic asset management

An industry as old as maritime is no stranger to change. But as time goes on, the pace of that change is increasing dramatically. With vessels trending bigger in size and climate hazards like flooding becoming more severe, shipyards need to boost resilience to keep pace with changes.

This is an incremental process – gone are the days of massive rip-and-replace investments. Today, you need to optimise and improve the assets you already have. And that means creating a clear line of sight of your assets and robust strategies and processes to keep them safe and maintained.

Increasing your resilience will also open up a huge number of opportunities to improve performance, creating a cycle of success for your shipyard. How you manage your assets has a vital role to play here, too.

Your shipyard assets affect every aspect of your operations

You’re an expert in keeping your clients’ vessels maintained, but it’s easy to forget to look inwards and do the same for your own critical infrastructure. But it is crucial. Postponing your maintenance, or losing track of it, makes it hard to see growing risks – and control them.

The impact of ill-maintained assets can be devastating. It’s not just that inefficiency and downtime can harm your bottom line. If a major piece of infrastructure fails or collapses, it can threaten the lives of the people in your shipyard.

By taking a strategic approach to asset management you can reduce the risk of disaster while limiting the impact of maintenance on your day-to-day operations. And with today’s clients caring more about both what you deliver and how you deliver it – you’ll protect your reputation, too.

Gain clear visibility of your asset condition and risk status

Maintaining visibility of your assets allows you to anticipate issues and optimise maintenance and investment while minimising downtime and improving safety and efficiency.

You need clear information about the general status of your infrastructure, its handling capacity, how – and how often – it should be maintained, and what risks and demands might soon affect it.

But that’s easier said than done. With so many assets making up your shipyard there’s a lot of information to gather, and making a start can be daunting. Especially if you have multiple systems and older infrastructure with limited useful information.

Sharing knowledge internally improves your resilience

Your people hold a lot of the information about your assets and processes in their heads. And that experience is what makes them so valuable. But you need to help them share it, so everyone has the most up-to-date information and a better view of how their work affects others.

It also helps to make someone accountable for the quality of your asset information. They can make sure it’s kept up to date and clearly communicated with the rest of the team, keeping everyone working together to support your shipyard.

Robust processes also give individuals a better view of your shipyard’s entire operations. So if, for example, they need to take something offline, they can see the consequences and consider the alternatives first.

Get guidance from expert shipyard consultants

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to asset management. And that’s especially true in the maritime industry. Other sectors can standardise processes for managing similar assets to stack marginal gains; but your shipyard assets are uniquely valuable, so while marginal gains can be significant, standardisation isn’t so simple.

Our experts can help you help build your assets’ resilience. We start with your challenges and specific local context, exploring key questions to uncover opportunities to have the biggest impact. We then combine our cross-industry asset management expertise and our deep understanding of shipyards to provide tangible advice.

You can use our support to establish processes to improve and maintain your visibility of what assets you have, what state they are in, what changes are likely to put them – and you – at risk. Plus, you can optimise maintenance and plan for market, climate, and technological changes.

Start your strategic asset management journey, today

Strategic asset management is an excellent mechanism to improve your resilience and deliver the best possible service for your clients, safely, and for longer.

What’s more, improving your shipyard’s resilience will also unlock opportunities to boost performance. Keep an eye out for our next blog to discover how strategic asset management could be the key to long-term performance improvements.