From Maintenance Logs to Strategic Asset Management:

How Germany's BLE Gained Full Lifecycle Control .

The Customer:

Bundesanstalt für Landwirtschaft und Ernährung (BLE),

Germany's Federal Office for Agriculture and Food.

The Challenge:

Managing the maintenance of unique, high-value vessels with inconsistent historical data stored in various formats. This made long-term budget forecasting difficult and created challenges in maintaining a standardized level of maintenance excellence across the fleet.

The Solution:

BLE implemented PRIME Marine's Planned Maintenance System (PMS) to create a single, unified database for all technical information and maintenance history.

The Fleet:

A specialized fleet of bulk carriers and fishery protection and research vessels, operating in demanding North Atlantic and global research missions.

KEY RESULTS:

95% Standardization

of all critical and statutory maintenance jobs across the fleet

20% Reduction

in time spent on annual maintenance budget forecasting

100% Data Integrity

for all Class and Statutory job histories, ensuring audit-readiness

Established a complete component lifecycle history for all major equipment

The Challenge: Managing High-Value, Unique Assets with Fragmented Data

Germany's BLE operates a fleet of sophisticated research vessels that are national assets. Unlike a standard commercial fleet, their challenge wasn't just managing routine maintenance; it was preserving the long-term value and operational readiness of these unique vessels. Their historical maintenance data was stored in a mix of older systems and detailed spreadsheets, which created significant challenges.

The primary pain points were:

Lack of Standardization: It was difficult to enforce a single, best-practice maintenance plan for similar equipment across different vessels.
Difficult Budget Forecasting: Creating accurate five-year maintenance and dry-docking budgets required manually collating data from multiple, inconsistent sources.
Incomplete Lifecycle Visibility: They couldn't easily track the complete history of a major component—from installation and overhauls to eventual replacement—in one place.

“Our vessels are not interchangeable. Each has highly specialized equipment," says Mr. Klaus Richter, Head of Vessel Operations for BLE. "While our onboard teams are exceptionally professional, the lack of a single, centralized system meant that the maintenance history for a critical winch on one vessel might be in a different format than the history for a similar winch on another. This made fleet-wide analysis and long-term financial planning a very manual, time-consuming process.

For a public entity, accountability is everything. We needed a system that could provide a clean, structured, and completely auditable history of how we are maintaining these valuable state assets. Our old system couldn't provide that level of assurance.”

Mr. Klaus Richter

Head of Vessel Operations, BLE

The Solution: A Centralized Database for Strategic Asset Management

BLE required a PMS that could provide deep data control and act as a central repository for the fleet's entire technical history. They selected PRIME Marine for its robust data architecture and its ability to standardize complex maintenance jobs.

The PRIME Marine team managed the complex task of migrating and cleansing years of historical data from BLE's various sources into the single, structured PMS database.

“The key feature for us was the ability to create a master library of standardized maintenance jobs in the shore office," explains Mr. Richter. "We could define the exact procedure, required spare parts, and safety documentation for a major engine overhaul once. We then pushed this standardized job to all relevant vessels. This immediately harmonized our maintenance approach across the fleet.”

The Results: Data Integrity, Financial Clarity, and Long-Term Control

The implementation of PRIME Marine's PMS provided BLE with a new level of strategic control over their assets.

1. Fleet-Wide Standardization and Best Practice

By using the centralized job library, BLE achieved 95% standardization of all critical maintenance routines. This ensures that every vessel is maintained to the same high standard, regardless of which crew is onboard, preserving the operational integrity of the fleet.

2. Data-Driven Budgeting and Forecasting

With a complete and clean history of all maintenance jobs and parts consumed, the annual budgeting process was transformed. "What used to take weeks of manual data compilation can now be done in days," says Mr. Richter. "We can instantly pull a report of all major overhauls due in the next five years, leading to a 20% reduction in the time our team spends on budget forecasting and a significant increase in accuracy."

3. Complete Component Lifecycle Visibility

For the first time, BLE had a complete, end-to-end history of their most critical components. They could track a specific generator from its installation date, through every routine service, every defect report, and every spare part consumed, giving them an unprecedented understanding of its total cost of ownership and true lifecycle.

“PRIME Marine gave us more than a maintenance planner; it gave us an asset management system. We now have the data integrity to confidently report on our activities and the strategic foresight to plan for the long-term health of our fleet. For a public institution, that level of control and transparency is invaluable.”