Norwegian startup Maindeck is looking to take the headache out of dry-docking projects with its eponymous cloud-based platform. The startup is also in the lineup of our Startup Profile 2020 series.
A vessel in drydock is not only a ship that is off hire and not earning money for the owner, it is quite likely costing it a lot of money. Drydocks, particularly the period where the vessel is out of the water and in a graving or floating dock, as opposed to at the wet berth, need to be as short as possible. Yet the docking period is a chance for the vessel’s managers to get a lot of deck, engine and hull repair and maintenance sorted. It is a project manager’s nightmare.
“They’re huge, complex processes”, says Sasan Mameghani, the CEO of a startup Maindeck. “The challenges of keeping control of these processes lead to huge cost overruns and delays. We are changing how technical ship managers work with these projects from the bottom up, bringing everybody and everything onto the same platform, giving them the information and the tools they need to avoid those cost overruns and delays,” he states.
Maindeck’s target customer base is the project manager that needs to keep oversight of all the various projects and the inevitable third party engineering and service companies that will be working on the vessel.
This is not small task as Mameghami says the project worksheet for a drydocking is often hundreds of pages long having been started from the moment the vessel left the last docking and continually built up since then.
“What’s more, all this has been done in different file formats and with different versions circulating”, he says. And this is why he thinks his work platform Maindeck, is so welcome.
As a former engineer Mameghani has first hand experience of the dangers of working in silos, particularly in big projects. “When you are not all on the same page, things easily slip.”
“Now everybody’s working together on Maindeck, so everyone and everything is organised in one place. With this as a starting point, they have the information needed for a successful project execution,” he claims.
Furthermore he says the platform’s project management functionality, which allows users to also involve external parties on selected parts of the project, means users are able to keep control of the progress throughout the process.
“One of the key benefits of Maindeck is that we allow for the entire team to work together on the same version of the project, [with] everything done in real time,” Sasan reports. “You have full transparency, so you can see who is working on what and you can delegate different work orders to your different colleagues. No other software allows for this and it is especially valuable in these times where most people are working remotely and need a tool that helps them collaborate properly.”
The difficulty is that with so many third party actors involved in a drydock schedule it may be difficult to get everyone to use the same work flow platform.
“If you are going to get control of an entire dry-docking process, you need to capture all the data along the way,” says Mameghani. “So, we started by creating the most-easy-to-use tool in the industry and our past projects prove that we have accomplished this.”
And of course, he claims that it works, that everybody, including the crew, specialists and yard, who have used Maindeck found it made their work easier than before.
Now Maindeck is adding more to its platform, what Mameghani calls logic – working with data science to take burden off the drydock superintendents.
“This is an ongoing work and it will completely change the way we prepare and execute dry-docking projects,” he asserts.
“Imagine being told what to include in the project specification or reminded if something is missing. Or while the project is ongoing, knowing exactly where there will be conflicts and exactly where, when and on what problems will arise. This is what the future with Maindeck will look like.”
As a cloud-based tool Maindeck can be used both through a web app or a mobile app, which comes with full offline functionality, and automatic updates
Headquartered in Oslo, Maindeck was co-found by Sasan and CTO Martin Ulleberg two years ago with the aim of “gathering all information on one platform” and “breaking down the information silos” that the industry had previously encountered.
More information on the company, which recently saw Hurtigruten signing up to use its platform, can be found at the Maindeck website here:
