Babcock International
Enabling Asset Management Transformation at a Major Naval Port
CLIENT
REQUIREMENT
Babcock International wanted to carry out a major assessment of its diverse assets at its Devonport Dockyard – the largest naval port in Western Europe – and employ optimised investment planning.
CHALLENGE
Handling the sheer range and complexity of assets, including many that are highly bespoke, while providing a standardised tool that engineers and managers can use to understand their assets and create investment plans.
SOLUTION
Our CHARM tool is supporting Babcock with its asset management transformation project.
Beating the giants to work with a giant
Babcock International is one of the UK Ministry of Defence’s most important prime contractors. It owns and operates two of the UK’s largest naval docks – at Devonport (Plymouth) and Rosyth (Scotland) – delivering through-life engineering services to support the Royal Navy’s fleet of ships and boats.
Babcock wanted a consistent and objective approach to support its asset management planning and investment planning. It wanted a tool to understand current health of dock assets in its largest dockyard, Devonport, predict the future condition and optimise interventions – the repairs, maintenance, and replacements.
To choose the right supplier, Babcock ran a competitive pilot. Decision Lab beat two major engineering consultancies – Frazer-Nash and Atkins – in the competition and was chosen to develop the Asset Risk Investment Model.
High stakes, low levels of data
Babcock had a comprehensive list of requirements for the Asset Risk Investment Model. An important consideration was that Devonport is a regulated nuclear site, so our approach would need to support the high level of scrutiny that would result.
The diversity of assets is vast: electrical systems, train lines, moving cranes, railway lines, buildings, docksides themselves, and many more. Many of these include unique, bespoke assets that require special maintenance and knowledge from the engineers to understand.
Previously Babcock had a mainly reactive approach, relying on inspections to assess the condition of the assets and responding to the most urgent things first. Most of the historical data we received mainly from such inspections: it wasn’t consistent and was often subjective, and there was a limited amount of detailed data for the size of the asset portfolio. This presented a challenge we had to overcome.
Building on our expertise
Through working with Nothern Powergrid and the Canal & River Trust, we have developed CHARM – the Combined Health Asset Risk Model. CHARM enables engineers to represent their assets within a model – its most important features, how it degrades over time and how it should be maintained – and collate data for this. It’s designed to support varied asset types and where there is limited data but good engineering knowledge. CHARM provided an ideal foundation, we tailored it to Babcock’s requirements.
Collaboration and new ways of working together
The key aspect of the project was adapting around the Babcock processes and the needs of lead asset engineers. We developed a well-defined approach that led the engineers through the process of defining their assets in the model, collecting the data and optimising the maintenance and investment plans. This included targeted workshops with engineers on their particular assets. We made CHARM a tool the engineers could use autonomously from beginning to end, with much less involvement of Decision Lab consultants.
High ambitions for CHARM in Babcock
For Decision Lab this has been a major project and provided us an opportunity to punch above our weight. We were a David winning the initial competitive pilot against two highly-respected Goliaths.
Babcock are currently collecting data on six asset systems. The tool enables optimal investment plans for each of these to be developed, and also optimised across all the systems, maximising the effectiveness of maintenance and investment across the dockyard.
Babcock has plans to roll CHARM out to more asset systems at their Devonport site and for it to become an invaluable Business as Usual tool. This is a great ambition and we are proud to being part of it as well as at services for our fantastic client.
Let’s collaborate
Send us an email, to discuss a new project.
We’re a team of innovators who are excited about unique ideas and help companies to create amazing solutions.