W&O valve with RFID tag connected
One of the biggest suppliers of valves, actuated valves, and speciality merchandise to the worldwide marine market, Jacksonville, Fla., primarily based W&O Supply, is launching a digital valve administration service.
The service, which makes use of RFID technology to establish essential valves on board, addresses a state of affairs by which many vessel operators lack even fundamental figuring out details about the valves they’ve on their ships, akin to kind, materials, age, or dimension. This leaves them struggling to take care of a clear valve database of their ERP (enterprise useful resource planning) system to permit automated buying by their groups ashore. This lack of perception will increase the dangers of improper supply of valves in case of an sudden breakdown, or signifies that replacements will not be match for function, or could lack important class testing, all losing money and time.
Taking a digital method to valve administration helps vessel house owners to keep away from ad-hoc ordering and last-minute components supply that might delay their operations.
Vessel house owners or ship managers typically solely overview the situation of their essential valves when vessels are in dry dock. This will increase strain on dry dock administration groups to have the ship refitted and again in operation as quickly as attainable. A pre-dry dock survey accomplished by an knowledgeable technical staff to examine and establish valves not solely saves money and time within the up-coming dry dock however, by making use of an RFID tag to the valve, makes future surveys faster and less complicated. The RFID tag incorporates particulars on the valve specification and its inspection and set up historical past, together with survey photographs, any security strain settings, and any related testing certificates.
By digitizing valve identification on this approach, the crew, technical departments and buying teams will discover it simpler to trace when valves want changing and discover the precise components. However, W&O believes that operators ought to go additional, by correctly digitalizing and linking the valves recognized on-board throughout the fleet with their technical database and its buying system. This ensures that operators can provide their vessels with the precise valves on the proper time, wherever they’re on the planet.
“The budget spend on marine valves is only a very small percentage of the total running cost of a fleet. Over the years we learned that technical and purchasing teams spend a lot of time to get the correct valves on-board. There are a huge number of valves onboard every ship so an effective management process is essential to get this right, and it can be hugely costly when this process goes wrong,” says Kristof Adam, European managing director, W&O Supply. “Valves can cause a serious administrative headache during normal operations or when in dry-docking The use of RFID tags and digitizing valve management and administration makes identifying, ordering and supplying valves much simpler, reducing the risk of financial losses due to errors.”
“Digitizing valve data using RFID tagging allows owners to track the status of valves over time across their entire fleet and adopt a time-based maintenance strategy,” says Adam. “Knowing which valves they should be replacing, based on the data available on the RFID tag, will allow operators to eliminate costly run-to-fail approaches that lead to ad-hoc and ill-informed valve ordering, that too often means the wrong valves are ordered.”
A pre-dry dock valve survey is designed to mitigate the dangers of getting valve orders improper. The RFID tags make the valve simply identifiable and join it to a digitalized valve stock that enables a dry-dock venture staff to know precisely what valve kind to order and its specs. With a transparent understanding of what valve to order, and any essential wants, akin to class society testing forward of time, valve set up throughout dry-docking is faster and less complicated, saving house owners and operators money and time throughout this important venture.
