Maritime and offshore tech specialist SRO Solutions is launching what it describes as the most complete digitisation package created to date for maritime firms using IT giant IBM’s Maximo asset management software.
The Manchester-based firm, founded by marine engineer Tony Lackey and recently bought by USA based Bentley Systems, was originally responsible for bringing IBM’s industry-leading Enterprise Asset Management software to the marine and offshore industries.
He said SRO has now brought all this expertise together in an off-the-shelf product which is pre-configured with the most common configurations and workflows to get maritime clients up and running in a fraction of the time.
“Customers can take advantage of a central solution, hosted in the cloud, via a subscription package,” he said. “If they wish to host Maximo on vessels with poor connectivity, SRO can supply them with a preconfigured ‘on premise’ Maximo instance, which replicates data using SDR.”
Mr Lackey said Maximo allows companies to streamline their global operations, from procurement to contract management, achieving greater efficiency, improved productivity and cost savings by harvesting data from their assets and ensuring a smarter, end-to-end asset lifecycle approach.
The Maximo software is also approved by the world’s leading classification societies, DNV and other leading classification societies, reassuring clients that the solution satisfies relevant class and legal obligations. The offering has integration capabilities which allow for remote surveying to be conducted, meaning fewer on-site audits are required.
“We’ve created a quick-start version of Maximo with pre-configured marine applications to meet classification requirements,” he said.
“We’re opening the solution up to a wider market, via a subscription model, to take away the pain of primitive computerised maintenance management systems (CMMS).
“You can tweak the configurations to suit the business, but essentially you have a starting point that is fit for purpose, fully hosted for a monthly fee with a small implementation cost.
“We can take a company’s data from existing systems and give them a full operating system quickly, plus extra modules we have developed which are specific to the maritime and offshore industries.
“The end client will get an enterprise-level system that is future proof, and constantly being developed.”
IBM’s R&D in 2019 alone was $6 billion, with an estimated $30-40 million on Maximo, ensuring it remains at the forefront of intelligent asset management across industries. Millions of executives, operators and technicians begin their workdays by opening the software, which provides monitoring, predictive maintenance, computer vision, safety and reliability in a single platform.
Automated workflow processes allow marine sector clients to automate reviews, approvals, data validation and record creation, while preconfigured dashboards keep users informed about the parts of the business which are relevant to them.
The pre-configured solution from SRO allows all members of a crew – from the captain to the fourth Engineer – to access information on a role-specific dashboard rather than wading through the entire system to find the data they are looking for.
SRO’s supplementary modules include a crewing app; STCW certification and training compliance; timekeeping and handover tools for watchkeeping, plus log book entries; near miss reporting; and an app for manifesting to assist with the complex management of delivered goods.
“Instead of the captain spending days typing up crew members, their passport numbers, yellow fever vaccination records, COVID vaccinations and other documents, they can pull it all together in a crewing app,” explained Lackey. “The vessel will also have full contact details for the crew at their fingertips.
“It means they can print out a report to get past immigration, as well as allowing them to create travel records for disembarking and embarkation processes.”