{mprestriction ids="1,2"}Under the agreement, 40 vessels in the Intership fleet will be retrofitted with Danelec Marine DM100 VDR and simplified VDR (S-VDR) systems. The installations are being performed by Raytec Marine, which is a long-time service provider for Danelec products in Cyprus. The schedule calls for the entire upgrade program to be completed by the end of 2020.

“Our choice of vendor was based on an analysis showing that Danelec equipment gave us the lowest cost of ownership and maximum return on investment. The elements forming part of the TCO analysis were price, total product lifetime, product quality with the highest MTBF in the industry, ease of installation, SWAP technology, remote diagnostics feature, extensive global service network, lifetime support and maintenance cost savings,” said Dieter Rohdenburg, CEO of Intership.

“Costly repairs and obsolete technology of existing VDRs and S-VDRs installed over 10 years ago were the main reasons for Intership’s decision to upgrade existing equipment to modern VDRs and S-VDRs,” confirmed Hans Ottosen, CEO of Danelec Marine.

Mr Ottosen also explained that the local support provided by Raytec Marine was also a key factor in the decision made by Intership. Raytec is the in-house service partner of Intership and represents manufacturers of bridge equipment.

According to Danelec, its universal conversion kits reduce the time and costs of installation when replacing other brands of VDRs by 25-30 per cent. Danelec’s exclusive SoftWare Advanced Protection (SWAP) technology allows instant switch-out of hardware during ship service calls, slashing costs and minimising ship downtime. With SWAP, all system software and configuration files, as well as programming data, are automatically saved on a hot-swappable memory card that can easily be removed from the old unit and inserted into the new one.

The installations include Danelec’s remote data access solution, allowing download of VDR data from the ship in shore offices, as well as remote reconfiguration, saving the time and costs of a ship service call. Danelec’s cloud-based remote access dashboard solution also allows monitoring of equipment connected to the VDR.

“Danelec’s remote management tool enables instant access to the vessel’s VDR from a PC on shore for transfer and replay of recorded VDR data in case of an incident or emergency situation,” said Mr Rohdenburg. “For the mandatory VDR Annual Performance Tests (APT), access can be provided to a VDR service technician in order to perform diagnostics of the system or to run a pre-APT test while the vessel is at sea, speeding up the actual APT when the ship arrives in port.”{/mprestriction}