Shipping companies wish to maximize the availability of their vessels and to prove to their charterers that their ships are well maintained. At the same time they need to reduce maintenance effort as well as repair costs and dry-docking times. The ideal solution, in theory, is to enhance a planned maintenance scheme - common in the industry for practically all machinery items within a vessel - with a condition-based maintenance (CBM) system. Such a system provides a basis for optimizing maintenance efforts and spare parts costs by maintaining an item only when its condition makes this necessary. However, even when shipping companies choose to complement their planned maintenance schemes with CBM, they still face many challenges, such as: how to integrate measured condition data from different equipment suppliers; how to bring visual inspection results into the same framework; how to easily compare sister vessels or the same equipment across a fleet; and how to integrate all of this information into a single maintenance management system.
