Maritime cargo handler MacGregor chooses Aras to develop predictive maintenance service

Aras, which provides a low-code platform with applications to design, build and operate complex products, has announced that MacGregor, a sustainable maritime cargo and load handling company, utilized Aras Innovator to further develop its OnWatch Scout, a condition-based and predictive maintenance service.

OnWatch Scout unites performance data from essential equipment aboard a ship and provides real-time condition and predictive monitoring information to the crew.

OnWatch Scout was developed by MacGregor as a step in the company’s digital services offerings, in which service engineering knowledge is digitalized to empower customers by putting information at their fingertips.

This information enables the identification of potential problems aboard a vessel and fix them in real time, reducing downtime and transportation delays.

Using Aras Innovator coupled with the Aras Digital Twin Core application, MacGregor took the initial concept of OnWatch Scout forward and developed additional functionality that would effortlessly create a digital twin configuration of a vessel, creating the context to couple with performance data to further improve reliability predictions of equipment performance and enabling timely maintenance planning.

The combined capabilities create a prescriptive maintenance solution that alerts the technical team when equipment needs attention and provides step-by-step recommendations on how to address the issue at hand.

Bhavik Thakker, director for digital solutions at MacGregor, says: “Our idea was to go a step further by not just offering predictive maintenance but also prescriptive maintenance capabilities.

“One of the key features of OnWatch Scout is having all relevant data at hand, with context, and we are able to efficiently create and manage this data with Aras Innovator as our backbone.”

MacGregor has used the Aras platform as a key step in increasing the maturity of the company’s equipment data management.

It acts as the single source of truth for documents, including manuals, step-by-step instructions and spare parts documentation.

In 2022, MacGregor received the SMART4SEA Technology Award for the development of OnWatch Scout.

They were chosen as a prime example of a service that uses data analytics to help shipowners and operators develop more proactive and condition-based intelligent strategies for maintenance.