10 Years of Insights on Fabric Maintenance Offshore
The Current State of Offshore Fabric Maintenance
Fabric maintenance has historically presented some of the biggest challenges to offshore operations worldwide, and the Gulf of Mexico is no exception to that. While standards like ISO 12944-9 and NORSOK M-501 emerged in the mid to late 90’s as a means to create coating systems that minimize maintenance requirements, they have done little to advance coating technology on that front. This has ultimately left fabric maintenance a stagnant field where problems persist for decades at a time, despite presenting many opportunities for improvement. As one operator that we spoke with succinctly put it, “It’s taken us 10 years to get 20 years behind.”
This industry-wide stagnation was propelled into motion by the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, although not in the direction that one might have hoped. With on-board personnel reduced to mere skeleton crews, countless hours of training opportunities were lost to the sands of time. Without a proper team, it’s only natural that maintenance schedules could not be met, further exacerbating the existing issues of FM activities throughout the years prior. Now 4 years later, today’s crews are still struggling to play catch up and get scheduled maintenance back on track. As seasoned experts continue to exit the workforce, years of practical knowledge and hands-on experience are being lost at a time, leaving the next generation largely in the dark. These factors combined help demonstrate the importance of evaluating the current situation so that the industry as a whole can take that first step in the direction of improvement.
Follow along with the white paper as we dive into our experience of collecting the data.
Measuring Productivity: The Importance of Key Metrics
As we began our mission to gather as much information on fabric maintenance offshore in the Gulf as possible, one issue quickly became apparent. What we anticipated across the board is that owners, operators, and contractors alike would monitor their productivity in one form or another. However, what we found is that very few of these parties keep track of productivity metrics at all. Those who document any data all march to the beat of their own drum, so to speak- meaning there is no general rule of thumb (let alone a standardized method) to measure productivity or monitor maintenance efficiency whatsoever.
This was observed most often when attempting to gather data on various parties’ maintenance cost per square foot. Some parties had data that reflected all activities on board per day, including ancillary operations that did not impact maintenance at all. Others did not account for differences between contractors, unique teams, or even paint systems despite the wild variances that can occur between those conditions alone. In our efforts to obtain production data on square feet per man per day, we found that this metric somehow got even less attention than cost per square foot.
For a more in-depth look at the variables that go into calculating the cost per square foot in FM activities, be sure to read our article, Breaking Down The Costs of Offshore Fabric Maintenance.
Factors Affecting Productivity
Using the limited data that we were able to collect, we set out to identify each and every factor which was being accounted for in offshore fabric maintenance activities throughout the Gulf. By doing this, we were then able to isolate activities which could be classified as Time-On-Tools. These are activities in which laborers actively perform a protective coating application or prepare a surface for such maintenance. Isolating these TOT activities and visualizing them on a pie chart provides an eye-opening insight as to where the greatest opportunity for improvement lies.
Application time itself comparatively made up very little of the TOT. What did make up a shockingly large portion of TOT was inter-coat preparations including washdown and drying. What can be gleaned from this is that the more coats are required by a system, the more fabric maintenance productivity will be negatively impacted. Naturally, this brings the matter of coating system selection into question.
Get the full picture, only in our white paper: Achieving FM Productivity. Download your free copy today.
The Cost Breakdown: Labor vs. Materials
Now, let’s pause- why focus on labor costs over material costs in the first place?
The reality is that material costs account for only 2% of offshore fabric maintenance costs overall. With that in mind, consider that a particular coating system is only half the price of a competing system. Would 50% off of 2% of costs overall really make a significant difference in the grand scheme of things? Not really. In comparison to labor costs, the cost of a given protective coating system is almost trivial to consider when identifying opportunities for savings in fabric maintenance offshore. However, the impact that coating selection has on labor time is a different matter entirely– one that can yield significant productivity improvements.
Strategies to Improve Fabric Maintenance Productivity
That brings us to potential strategies and recommendations for the first steps in the right direction, as we previously mentioned. For those who are currently using protective coating systems that take 3, 4, or even 5 coats for a proper application, making the switch to a 2-coat system can shave hours off of scheduled maintenance activities for a better utilization of TOT. Since inter-coat prep activities make up such a large portion of TOT, reducing the number of coats needed for a complete system application holds great potential for labor cost savings and improved productivity.
While coating selection can produce visible results in a matter of days if not hours, the long-term solution begins with a massive, tedious, yet arguably much more important undertaking. We’re talking about data monitoring and collection. What we found is that many offshore operations hardly have a baseline from which to measure the difference of any changes that they implement. Those that do collect data often fail to consider variances from important factors like coating systems, contractor crews, the way the work was carried out (block vs. chase systems), and so forth. As we’ve demonstrated here, the mere act of gathering the data to perform a proper analysis is a crucial step to identifying room for improvement. To get more insights and to get a closer look at the numbers we encountered, be sure to download the white paper, Achieving FM Productivity.
