Murmansk Commercial Seaport

Murmansk Commercial Seaport
$10,400 USD SAVED IN FIRST MONTH

Murmansk Commercial Seaport (MCSP) is located on the eastern coast of the Kola Bay in the Barents Sea; it is the largest transport company of the city of Murmansk. It was established in 1915 and immediately after its establishment, this ice-free port became a port of strategic importance to Russia; evolving into one of the main Russian ports for foreign trade operations.

JSC Murmansk Commercial Seaport features seventeen berths with a total length of about 3,000 meters. The length and depth of the berths allow the port to accept and complete cargo operations with vessels with a draft of up to 15.5 meters, a length of more than 265 meters and a dead weight of up to 150,000 tons. Since the beginning of 1999, the port has been successfully working with PANAMAX vessels carrying up to 80,000 tons with the productivity of up to 20,000 tons per day. The port is equipped with modern technology: large heavy gantry cranes with lifting capacity up to 40 tons, a loading machine for transshipment of apatite concentrate with productivity of over 1,000 t/h, and fork-lift trucks with lifting capacity ranging from 1.5 to 45 tons. For auxiliary operations, the port is equipped with tractor engines and roll trailers (up to 60 tons), bulldozers, tractors, and shunting locomotives. The turnover equals to 18 million tons per year, of which 80% accounts for coal logistics.

The main activity of the MCSP are loading and unloading operations in seaports, including unloading and loading of cargo to and from ships, wagons and motor transport.

Today, the enterprise fleet consists of 182 units of specialized machines serving 220 thousand wagons and 600 ships a year. With such a high volume of work, it is extremely difficult to control the operation of special machinery and calculate downtime.

In 2013, the representatives of the Murmansk Commercial Seaport issued a tender aimed at replacing the existing transport and fuel consumption monitoring system.

The existing equipment did not cope with the volume of work and malfunctioned. In addition, the terminals that were installed on the equipment incorrectly displayed information on fuel consumption, producing data with a large margin of error.

Therefore, the tender was organized with the goal of replacing the existing system with more reliable and accurate equipment that would allow the company to do the following:

Obtain accurate information on the operation of the technology
Gain control over fuel as it travels from the refueling tanker to the gas station before it leaves the territory of the enterprise
Take into account engine hours worked; receive timely notifications of the approaching scheduled maintenance session
Generate reports showing the efficiency of a given unit and the entire fleet of the company
In order to objectively assess the bids, it was decided to equip the special machinery of JSC MCSP with monitoring systems of various manufacturers and test all of them in operation.

By the end of the testing, only the Omnicomm solution still worked. Based on these results, the management decided to equip the entire fleet with Omnicomm fuel management system.

Omnicomm was selected as the provider because only Omnicomm was able to address certain priority key requirements:

Experience with similar projects
Availability of permits, certificates and licenses in order to work with radio devices
Availability of skilled personnel
Availability of the support service unit in Murmansk
Possibility of acquiring additional equipment when expanding the fleet
Project cost
The implementation of the fuel management system began in late October of 2013, and in 6 months the project was completed and the equipment was successfully installed on 182 units of machinery. The machinery was out of operation for only a short time in order to carry out the necessary installation and configuration, there was virtually no downtime for the organization during the process.

365 days a year Omnicomm equipment works in any negative environment and climatic conditions

“For us, it is important that the equipment works properly in extremely harsh conditions. For example, the range of temperatures that our machines have to work in varies from -30 up to +30 degrees Celsius. In addition, we have to work in a hostile environment under the influence of precipitation, sea air, chemical and mineral substances, manganese ore and apatite concentrate. All of these factors have a negative influence on the equipment and machinery, causing their malfunction. And equipment has to work 365 days a year in any climatic conditions.”

– Alexander Masko, General Director, JSC MCSP

Another important benefit that MCSP gained from using Omnicomm was the identification of fuel drainage and theft, and other misuse of the company’s resources.  In the course of monitoring performed by the system, a case of fuel draining from one unit of loading equipment onto another was recorded. The Omnicomm solution allowed this case to be identified, enabling management to take appropriate action – in this case personnel decisions were made and administrative penalties applied.  MCSP concluded that the Omnicomm fuel management solution provides the required and accurate data to allow company management to properly manage the financial impact of fuel and engine life.

“We have seen the first results of introducing the Omnicomm fleet management system very soon – already in the first month of test operation, we saved 12 155 liters, which equaled to 10 400 USD. Based on the analysis of the obtained data, the economic security service conducts raids with the aim of identifying negligent workers, who leave the machines on in the idle mode during lunch or downtime. The administration has been taking measures to improve the efficiency of the use of the machinery, and already in a few months we have noticed the significantly decreased operation of the machinery in the idle mode.”
– Alexander Masko

After a month of operation, representatives of the Murmansk Commercial Seaport chose to integrate the data obtained from the Omnicomm equipment into the automated information system (AIS) of the company. This application is utilized by the MCS management team to manage the company’s business processes.

“The automated information system now displays where the company vehicles are located and which function the vehicles complete within the given time. It is very convenient for the optimization of business processes. The company plans to use the potential of Omnicomm terminals in order to improve efficiency of loading operations using cranes and loading equipment. For example, a sensor, mounted on the grapple or bucket loader will be able to give us the information on how many cargo operations and what optimum speed we need to load the coal and ore to the ship. Which ones of the crane operators work most effectively by loading more cargo with fewer operations and which ones do not. Who we should provide incentives and give bonuses to and who should not be receiving them. The Omnicomm solution integrated into the industrial safety system will be able to warn the driver of a loader with a special signal that reads: “Attention! You are now in the working zone of a crane in operation or next to a railway crossing”. This measure will significantly increase safety in our company. We have a lot of plans aimed to streamline the work of special equipment of the Murmansk Commercial Seaport, and we hope to implement them in the future. We are very happy that Omnicomm equipment is universal and can be integrated with many devices and software options. In the meantime, we recommend the Omnicomm solution to our business partners – SK Maly Port and a few coal enterprises of Kuzbass, which demonstrated their interest in our new solution; the best recommendation would be to show the results of the implementation of the system by our own example.”

– Vladimir Khovansky, Non-Executive Director, JSC MCSM