Accelerated growth of servicing and maintenance services

Alongside savings, the industrial internet accelerates the development of the company’s servicing and maintenance services. At Kongsberg, the Condition Monitoring business operations have an annual growth of up to 30 – 40 percent. The remote monitoring system has moved the focus of business from the reactive doctoring of propeller devices to an increasingly more proactive direction.

“Data about the equipment’s load level and capacity, which is obtained weeks if not months in advance, provides plenty of time for corrective procedures. Replacements for failing measurement computers can be prepared and sent to the vessels in a timely manner”, comments Kongsberg’s Condition Monitoring Director Lars-Erik Saarinen.

Manual work at a minimum

According to Remion’s Chief Executive Officer Jukka Kivimäki, the results obtained by Kongsberg clearly indicate, how manual work in data processing is worth minimising. As digitalisation progresses, more and more attention is paid on the quality of data. Modern remote monitoring raises typical problem situations from the overflow of data and directs to the root causes of such problems.

Saarinen praises Remion’s Regatta system: “The remote monitoring system has allowed the troubleshooting and correction of propeller devices to be speeded up from a couple of days to a few seconds. This reduces the working hours of the condition monitoring team by up to 50 percent and facilitates the maintenance procedures of vessels that are located in challenging sea conditions. A similar system is not yet in use anywhere else in the industry.”

In the future a vessel will be remotely controlled

The remote monitoring system delivered by Remion is an internationally significant breakthrough, because industrial internet has only slightly been utilised on ocean vessels. Kongsberg’s new system is also a step towards an unmanned vessel, which remote control technology the company is currently developing.

“Our aim in the near future is to develop a vessel, which can be completely remote-controlled from land. The flexibly scalable Regatta allows the monitoring of individual machines as well as entire equipment ensembles, which supports our objective”, states Kongsberg’s Condition Monitoring Director Lars-Erik Saarinen.