Jon Childs: Out of the bottleneck

He’d worked his way up in the company from an apprenticeship – but though he’d advanced, his ‘toolkit’ just hadn’t kept pace. “It was extremely frustrating. I’d be spending days, if not weeks ploughing through Excel spreadsheets and batting studies backwards and forwards to customers with the relative merits of this or that solution. And I kept telling my colleague that given the time, I was sure I could get a computer to iron out the process.”

It might have been left at that, but when that same colleague reappeared as his boss over a decade later it seems the conversations hadn’t been forgotten: “He drew me to one side and asked if I remembered all those great ideas… and then he said, ‘take a year out and just do it’.”

The result, GE’s Vessel Performance Analyzer (VesPA), ties together critical requirements – such as the draw of the dynamic positioning system – with the other consumers: “You can cycle through all the different possibilities in maybe a morning of meetings with everyone around the table; it will show up where a slightly more complex solution could save megawatts of engine power.” And as a side effect, people like Mr Childs are no longer the technical knowledge bottleneck they once were.

But he admits VesPA probably needed the right economic environment to get a head start, and that wasn’t necessarily the most benign one.

“Not that long ago the marine industry was very buoyant and very active but the relationships we had with our customers, predominantly the shipyards, were what you might call just ‘transactional’.”

“By that I mean people would buy ships based on very basic specifications: so although we’d be receiving enquiries from all around the world, we found a lot of key decisions on the electrical installation had already been influenced by the suppliers of other systems without consideration to the overall impact. The trend was then, you quoted against the spec, and you either met it or you didn’t; if you questioned whether it was the best system for the ship you could find you got a cool response.”

“But now, the economic downturn is really forcing owners and operators to refocus and think about how they can eke the most out of their existing assets. The very few new ones being planned at this point have to answer a whole raft of questions; they want to know how they can get the most out of them in terms of efficiency, reduction of non-productive time, reliability… And they’re all looking for some special X factor that gives them the edge over their competitors.”

It’s all pointed to less simple specification, more collaboration. But this does rest on shortening the potential for endless iterations of the power layout… which is where VESPA, now on its fourth release, comes in. “It has grown well beyond anything I could have imagined,” adds Mr Childs.

However, he says the idea of working collaboratively is more than another selling point: as ships get more complex, there are real dangers to hanging on to entrenched views and seeing the various onboard systems in isolation.

“Firstly, optimising any one element on its own won’t work; we might be able to take money out of the power line up, but it could incur a significant cost increase in a different part of the ship.”

More, he explains the tendency for ‘inward looking’ design criteria can cause issues. “Virtually any system will have some element of self protection. When you start to engage in these collaborative discussions you’re reminded that this doesn’t always point in the right direction.”

“As a simple example if you have a motor responsible for the drilling head on a rig, and one of the sensors shows the motor is beginning to get a little hot, the electrical system surrounding it will try shut it down, not because it’s in danger of immediate failure, but just as a precaution against damage. But this will effectively be shutting down the operation; so you’re now losing hundreds of thousands of dollars production a day because this subsystem has decided it does not want to take any risks.”

“Of course you need to provide the ship with the right kind of feedback but it’s probable that they will want to keep going. They have to be control of the decision, not the ship taking control and automatically shutting down.”