Astoria Consulting joins SIMTech to introduce shipping technology

“AstorPlan” is aimed to optimise resources planning and deployment resulting to productivity boost for marine industry.

On 27th April 2010, Astoria Consulting Pte Ltd launched “AstorPlan”, a technology that promises big productivity boosts for shipyards and their marine sub-contractors by allowing better optimisation of the planning and deployment of critical resources. This is a world first for the application of such technology in the marine industry.

AstorPlan is developed jointly with scientists from the Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology (SIMTech), a research institute of A*STAR, in an R&D project supported by the Maritime Port Authority of Singapore (MPA). Astoria Consulting licensed from Exploit Technologies the right to market the technology in February 2010, and has gone on to partner Microsoft and HP to bring the solution to industry.

AstorPlan is able to have such a large impact partly due to the unique way the industry is organised. The Offshore & Marine sector operates in a complex and time-constrained environment with many projects and processes being performed by both own work teams and sub-contractors simultaneously. Planning and management of the critical resources deployed in order to meet schedules and overcome unforeseen problems impacts directly on costs and profitability but is prone to human errors.

In the past, the typical response to unscheduled delays and unforeseen circumstances is to just authorise more over-time or to ask sub-contractors to rush last-minute “urgent orders” in order to catch up. This can be costly, and as the yard typically undertakes multiple projects all at the same time, a delay in one project can tie up critical resources scheduled and needed for another, leading to snowballing time and cost over-runs. Furthermore, delays in delivery may be unacceptable to clients and could lead to large penalties.

To address these issues, Astoria Consulting and SIMTech developed novel optimisation algorithms based on critical chain methodology to tackle resource constrained scheduling in a multi-project environment typical in the marine industry. This is a world first for the application of such technology in the marine industry.
To further ensure rapid adoption by end-users, Astoria Consulting intentionally integrates the “AstorPlan” technology with Microsoft’s Project software, which enjoyed widespread use and acceptance in the industry as a project planning tool. This minimises the upgrade’s implementation time and risks as well as protecting the customer’s existing investment in worker training and education. Astoria Consulting also partners up with HP to deliver the solution as a complete package including computer hardware, support and services.

Singapore has the world’s busiest sea-port and its offshore & marine sector is also one of the most competitive globally, with an estimated 70% global market share in oil rigs and 20% of shiprepair and conversion jobs.

However, the $18 billion (2008) industry is already feeling the constraints of limited land and escalating cost of labor and other resources, and the key to higher productivity growth may be to become better organised and to adopt more integrated ways of working such as forming consortiums and sharing information and IT systems. It is only by investing in innovation that Singaporean companies can hope to stay ahead of the curve enough to keep emerging regional challengers at bay.

This is the reason that some customers of Astoria Consulting, such as AME International Pte Ltd, have been investing in and benefitting from innovation and automation.