One portal for everything
Damen Shipyards is an international ship building concern. For the maintenance of the many different ships they deliver worldwide, they make use of so-called Field Service Engineers.
Iquality was asked to invent a solution allowing the engineers (FSEs) to find all the necessary data to properly prepare and conduct their own work. This gave rise to the Technical Support Portal, one digital portal
This portal contains all relevant information in a clear and insightful way. Additionally, the portal allows field service engineers to directly link back data on field visits, which means that all stakeholders are informed about the progress and status. Via the knowledge base, fleet data and vessel data pages, FSEs can be informed of (technical) subjects and knowledge can be better exchanged. By realising this portal, the services organisation is able to function more efficiently, as less time is lost on informing each other. Ultimately, this means that the customer can be helped better and more quickly.
TSP part of Damen Services Portal
The Damen Services Portal (damenservices.com) went live in 2013 and was set up to offer Damen customers services via the digital highway. Currently, there are 140 customers who make use of the Portal and Damen makes the data of approximately 360 ships available, consisting of documents such as manuals, certificates, drawings and, in some cases, an equipment object structure (EOS). Warranty requests can also be viewed and submitted. Additionally, there is a Parts Store where customers can order 'generic' articles or request a quote for these. Within Damen, a growing need for information arose at internal stakeholders (particularly FSEs) in terms of up-to-date ship documentation, knowledge (in the broadest sense of the word) and transaction information.
Project approach
The TSP is part of the current Damen Service Platform. For the realisation of the TSP, existing components were used. This resulted in saving on development expenses. The TSP has achieved its own dynamic by slightly adjusting components to the use case, both graphical and functional. FSEs have the possibility to log on themselves via their own portal, where they will only see the information that is relevant to them. Each Field Service Engineer has a personal login account he can use to authenticate himself. (the knowledge base is in Sharepoint, but we have integrated this via an iframe)
Additionally, Iquality has made a second efficiency step in this project by handling certain data flows in a smarter and more effective way. By switching to incremental exchange of data rather than complete data sets from back office systems to the website, the data processing has become much more efficient and the total run-time of the data import has significantly decreased.
