Summary
TU Delft, 3mE, Production Engineering & Logistics iv
Summary
Royal Boskalis Westminster NV is an international dredging Group. The operations of Boskalis are spread broadly across the world in three business segments, which gives the flexibility to capture a wide range of projects.
The main business segment is dredging and earthmoving, including the construction and maintenance of ports and waterways, land reclamation, pipeline intervention activities, coastal defense and
riverbank protection. The other business segments are maritime infrastructure and maritime and terminal services.
All main equipment used by Boskalis is managed by the Central Technical Department (CTD), with the exception of basic equipment in the home markets. This department operates as the ship-owner of the central fleet and charters vessels and equipment to the various projects of the business units and home markets.
The CTD charters the vessels and equipment to the projects and charges hire, costs for wear & tear and fixed repair costs over those vessels and equipment. To charge those costs to the right project, it should be monitored which equipment is employed at each project and how much wear and tear the equipment encounters. Therefore, the location, quality and quantity of equipment are monitored closely. This monitoring of the equipment has currently some shortcomings resulting in contradicting values between the data stored in the database and the actual data at the projects. As a result, the projects are wrongly charged with equipment costs, there is little control over the equipment and while the condition of the equipment is unknown, the resulting production capacity is not certain. The monitoring of the equipment should be improved by setting up a watertight monitoring system in which all necessary information is up to date and controllable.
Analysis showed that the monitoring of the equipment will imply the monitoring of over 40.000 pieces of equipment separated over 150 different types. This equipment is used during the execution of projects to pump the dredged material to the allocated location. The main equipment are pipes with al length of 12 meter and diameters varying from 70 cm to 110 cm. Each of those types has a certain quantity of equipment with different quality gradations.
When this equipment is deployed to a project, batches of equipment are created based on three properties: type, location and quality. Almost at every project, there are several batches of the same type deployed, resulting in mixed quality gradations.
In the database those batches are kept up correctly, so on paper there are different batches at a specific project, while there is in practice only one big stack consisting of all the equipment. So at the end of the project, those batches are mixed up and the only way to recover those batches is to measure all conditions and separate the different gradations again.
Summary
TU Delft, 3mE, Production Engineering & Logistics v Currently, the monitoring is controlled by a quantity and quality control per project. The quantity of equipment should be counted every week at each project to determine the quantity of equipment to charge hire and fixed repairs over. The quality data is measured as the percentage of the remaining wall thickness of the equipment rounded off to tens. The quality should be measured during an in-survey at the start of the project, and during an out-in-survey at the end of the project. The decrease in wall thickness of the equipment will be charged to the project.
As described, the quality and quantity measurements are important to charge the costs to the project, but after the measurements are done, the data cannot be coupled to the equipment. As a result, the equipment should be surveyed each time, both during the in- as well as the out-survey, which is a very time consuming process. To reduce the time necessary for performing a survey, they are often done by taking test samples or are not done at all, resulting in incomplete and wrong measurements. To improve the monitoring of the equipment, it is important to generate a system which is able to link the measured data unconditionally to the equipment. The only way to create such a system is by numbering each piece of equipment uniquely. The condition and location of the equipment will be coupled to this number, which makes it possible to verify and retrieve these data anytime. Using such a numbering will also open the possibility to create a project history of the equipment.
To control the monitoring, the currently performed quantity and quality control will be adapted. The quantity of equipment will be updated when equipment enters or leaves a project, as these moments are important for the payments off the projects. The quality control still takes place during the in- and out-survey, but while the quality data of each piece of equipment has been kept up, the in-survey will often be derived from the out-survey done at the previous project.
To apply the identification to the equipment, some concepts have been examined. The main
conditions this identification should satisfy are: it needs to outlive the equipment, be easy to read, be accessible, be user friendly and have a positive cost-benefit relationship. The concept that suited these conditions best is by applying the identification to the equipment by using radio frequency identification (RFID). Each piece of equipment will be fitted with an RFID-tag which contains the unique number of the equipment. The unique numbers are coupled to the equipment data, like condition and location which are stored in a database.
Those tags can be read with a handheld reader during the survey activities and when the equipment enters or leaves a project. Each time the tags are read, their data will be updated in the database. The main advantage of this unique numbering will be that the data stored in the database is controllable in practice. The equipment data stored in the database does actually correspond to the equipment at the projects. Besides that, the cost calculations can be done precisely and the remaining production capacity can easily be determined.
A next step will be to create a definitive design for the software used on the handheld reader and the corresponding database. After that, the software and database will be created and tested before it will finally be implemented.
