Maintenance & Techniques

On board, an identification label has to survive heat, vibration, salt spray and high-pressure washing. This article covers how to choose the label material for each area of the vessel, what to encode in the code itself, how to tag spares and safety equipment with expiry dates, and why offline scanning is what lets a newly joined officer retrieve an item's history without asking anyone.

Ashore, a breakdown costs hours of downtime. At sea, it costs a port call, a tow, sometimes a detention. This guide gives the equation that decides the move to condition-based maintenance on a vessel: which assets to monitor, with which technologies, what classification societies will credit, and how to put figures on the return across a fleet.

A preventive maintenance plan that works ashore often fails on board: the crew changes every two months, the part only arrives at the next port call and the ISM auditor asks for proof. Here is the four-step method for building a PMS that is realistic, workable at sea and defensible at a classification society survey.

Reliability centered maintenance is not a method to apply everywhere: it decides where to concentrate maintenance effort on board. Here are the seven questions of the method applied to the main engine, generator sets, steering gear and sea water systems, together with three points specific to ships: reconciling the analysis with mandated tasks, hidden failures of standby arrangements under chapter 10.3 of the ISM Code, and the fleet effect across sister vessels.

On board, the person carrying out a maintenance job plan has sometimes never seen the vessel, and the person who wrote it left the ship six months ago. The job plan becomes the only vehicle for transmitting know-how. How to write it for a multilingual crew, build work permits and hold points into it, keep it compliant with the ISM Code and reuse it across a series of sister ships.

From request to analysis, the full life cycle of a work order on board a ship: why offline capture decides whether your records are reliable, how to hand an open job over at the change of watch, how planning is driven by port call windows, and why the work order is the unit of evidence examined by the ISM auditor and the port State control inspector.