OEM maintenance packages offer more

“These are standard products, but where customers have other demands variations can be discussed,” says Gary Walker, director of port container terminal services. He adds that the company wants to perform the maintenance on its products to ensure optimum serviceability and provide maximum operational availability for the customer.

He stresses that third-party maintenance contracts are never exactly off-the-shelf products, so will always be customised.

As to whether terminals are more inclined to use outside contractors on certain types of equipment and not on others, he suggests that, in general, the more straightforward and commonplace a product is, the easier it is to maintain. However, for the more complex and critical products deployed on a terminal, it makes absolute sense to contract the maintenance out to a specialist, such as Cargotec.

“We can’t always undertake maintenance on a product cheaper than the terminals can do it themselves, but in most cases we can,” says Mr Walker.

“This is because Cargotec has a large service organisation with highly skilled maintenance engineers who are very familiar with the equipment they are maintaining. To customers, going back to the OEM is reassuring, since they know it is being maintained by the original manufacturer. In addition, the burden that is sometimes associated with maintenance is effectively transferred to an external company.”

As to whether bigger or smaller terminals are more likely to outsource maintenance, Mr Walker says there is no absolute trend, since everything depends on the philosophy of the terminal. Nevertheless, small terminals don’t usually need a full-time maintenance work force or simply don’t want to take on this responsibility and hence are inclined to outsource their maintenance. Large terminals that do have sufficient work to employ their own maintenance force might still elect to outsource, arguing that they want to make a distinction between what the core activities of the terminal should be and which should be outsourced.

“There is no ‘rule-of-thumb’ in this respect, with each terminal having its own point of view. However, Cargotec is willing to support all its customers if they require maintenance support,” says Mr Walker.

He says that there is no data available regarding whether terminals looked into externalising maintenance as a result of the recent recession in the industry, but again points out that there is often a financial case to be made by outsourcing, although this will depend on a number of factors and generalisations cannot therefore be made.

Nevertheless, modern equipment is becoming ever more sophisticated, stretching the maintenance capabilities of some operators, notes Mr Walker. “With automation and semi-automation, as well as remote monitoring, becoming ever more common in terminals, it is certainly possible that maintenance management could be outsourced more frequently. Whether such services will be outsourced to OEMs or to a third party, depends entirely on the customer,” he says.