Since the beginning of the year, IT services company Crimsonwing has been involved in the development of a new business solution for the Lloyd's Register Group. Known as Hull Integrity, this new service allows owners and operators to better manage their vessels' hull structural integrity.
For over 200 years Lloyd's Register has been working to enhance safety and approve assets and systems at sea, on land and in the air. By continuously checking assets and systems, Lloyd's Register allow people and communities worldwide to get on with everyday life in safety.
A large part of Lloyd's Register's business is marine, which involves the classification of ships and setting of standards of quality and reliability during their design, construction and operation.
The new Hull Integrity service comprises three key elements, which enable a ship's crew to undertake hull inspections in a systematic and auditable manner:
• training in how to carry out inspections;
• ship-specific hull inspection guides; and
• Hull Integrity software for recording and analysis.
This approach allows fleet operators to move away from bespoke hull inspections as part of their routine maintenance regimes to something simpler, quicker and more auditable.
The Hull Integrity software provides operators with standard guidance combined with past records that can be accessed on ship and shore. It enables ship owners to view the current status of any ship via the Internet and also allows for stand-alone operation to be deployed on a ship where there is no Internet connectivity other than for transmission of data once in port.
This approach provides for a single application code base that can be deployed in either ship or shore mode.
The Hull Integrity software is installed on board the ship and enables quick, concise and consistent reporting of hull inspections. The software is easy to use and provides a number of useful functions, including an inspection checklist generator and templates for recording results.
Once a Hull Integrity inspection report is completed, it is sent ashore via satellite communications to a secure server. The resulting inspection database can be accessed by the fleet superintendent and the operator can grant limited access to third parties, such as charterers and financiers.
The superintendent can also use the Hull Integrity defect and repair list generator to easily produce a drydock repair specification.
The advantages of Hull Integrity are most immediately apparent for operators of tankers and LNG vessels, due to the particular regulatory and commercial third-party requirements that they face. In practice, however, the service is applicable to all ship types, existing or newbuild.
The service is not a class requirement, so it can also be used by owners and operators of non-Lloyd's Register-classed ships.
Delivery of this unique solution required a high degree of collaboration between the Lloyd's Register Marine Operations team, who have a high degree of familiarity with hull inspections, and the designers and delivery team at Crimsonwing.
An iterative development approach was adopted to allow for a high degree of involvement by the Lloyd's Register experts in the design and build phases of the project. This required the Crimsonwing team to adopt a new development methodology to provide an iterative development approach, incremental releases and repeated testing throughout the project lifecycle.
Lloyd's Register maintained a keen presence throughout the project development.
Hull Integrity was developed in Crimsonwing's solutions centre in Malta by a team of six using the Microsoft .Net framework and best practices. The initial solution took 670 man-days of Crimsonwing time and much more from the Lloyd's Register team.
Expressing his pleasure at the collaborative nature of the project, Stephen Hand, group IT director for Lloyd's Register, said: "The software is now fully owned and accepted by members of Lloyd's Register marine operations staff, who were fully engaged in the requirement definition, design and development processes.
"The product is, as a result, not an 'IT' product and is selling well beyond its business revenue projections."
Since the solution was launched at Posidonia - the annual international shipping exhibition in Athens, in June, Unicom, Shell and OSG Overseas Shipholding Group Inc. have signed up for Hull Integrity with a number of their vessels.