According to Mr. Chen, SaierNico, founded in 1994, is a professional supplier of electrical and automation systems for vessels. It is a high-tech company that specializes in R&D, production, sales, comprehensive technical services for electrical and automation systems, and systems integration for ships and ocean engineering. After more than 20 years of development, SaierNico has delivered more than 3,000 ship sets of various products; providing more than 200 sets of electrical automation integration packages. The company covers nearly all ship types, including bulk carriers, container ships, tankers, chemical tankers, LNG ships, marine engineering ships, and ro-ro ships to more than 400 of its customers worldwide. In the field of ship sets, the company has maintained a leading position in the market share of switchboards for more than 10 years and is at the international forefront.
When talking about the overall informationization level of the maritime industry, Mr. Chen says that the automation of China's maritime industry has basically been implemented; informationization is gradually improving, while intellegentization is in its infancy. He explained that this is due to the external economic situation; according to the Analysis of the Economic Operation of the Shipbuilding Industry in the First Half of 2018 report issued by the China Association Of The National Shipbuilding Industry, although the global shipping market ushered in a small increase in the first half of 2018, difficulties in financing, delivery, and profitability still exist. On the other hand, the transfer of the ship set industry causes the shipbuilding industry to lag behind overall. Many users are slow to adopt changes in comparison to the automobile, electronics, and other industries, and ship customers need to go through a concept recognition process for smart applications.
The development of science and technology has had a profound impact on the shipbuilding industry, and the impact of the penetration of Internet technology into traditional industries is significant, which also promotes the intelligentization of ships. “2019 is also a critical period for SaierNico to move towards intelligentization, transformation, and upgrade.” In his view, with the emergence of big data, smart terminals, and sensing technologies, the development of smart ships has become the trend of the times. Ship data collection, analysis, and visual presentation through cloud platforms will also greatly reduce the construction costs and operation and maintenance costs of making ships smart.
But this is not easy. Mr. Chen explained that ships are often offshore and many ocean-going vessels only return to their bases once a year. Thus, the probability of failure of supporting equipment and systems must be reduced to a minimum. Secondly, although the supporting equipment of smart ships has been automated, a unified information platform and intelligent processing platform must be built. Finally, if there is a problem with the supporting equipment and system of the smart ship, the impact will be more serious than the failure of normal ship equipment and may even lead to mistakes in the decision-making of the ship's operation.
As such, SaierNico has taken the data-driven remote monitoring of ships as the first step of intelligent development and realized the management mode of “one cloud, two sides (ship-cloud platform-shore)” through the cloud platform to complete the collection, transmission, analysis, modeling, and presentation of operational data of the ship. It has established and modified the regular model, explaining that scientific improvement of the customer's decision-making, which, in turn, improves the overall performance and operational efficiency of the ship.
