Vulkan and their new idea of service: preventive maintenance for pleasure crafts

Vulkan Italia promotes a different concept of service, aiming to involve a wide network of workshops throughout Italy: a sort of programmed inspection for couplings and mounts, whose wear might significantly affect performance. Giulio Alberti, Vulkan’s After Sales Service Manager, is a key figure within this project.

«We started from the relationship that Vulkan Italia has always had with specialized workshops. We think it is important for the ship owner to have a reference network with professionals trained on our products and to develop a constant preventive maintenance program that makes it possible to keep the wear of components under control».

More specifically, what does the program consist of? «The periodic inspection is aimed at verifying the condition of the elastic elements and their compliance with certain limit parameters. The intervention does not necessarily lead to component replacement. For rubber parts, the age limits depend on the years or hours of operation, with significant differences according to the stress to which they are subjected».

Enhanced service actions, according to Vulkan

The preventive maintenance project, which will be carried out all over Italy, is strongly based on training. «Initially, with a series of webinars and, hopefully in the near future, with live sessions. We have planned a cycle of specific training events on vibro-acoustic, product and application issues: an actual support on the management of our products. We started in July with the first cycle focused on the issue of comfort on board: even with small refit interventions that do not distort the existing layouts, the level of comfort can increase significantly, thus making the owners satisfied. The close relationship with the workshops is also important in order to allow us to collect fleet data that will become part of the global database. All this will give us the possibility to have even more information on the products wear, so to schedule our service activities even more effectively. Acting proactively, in short, without waiting for possible breakdowns, with a team of experts close to our customers, also able to solve problems, with the active support of the Vulkan team above all for the most complex retrofit projects», explains Mr Alberti.

Not only pleasure boating?

The project is expected to start by the end of this year and will initially be limited to pleasure boats. However, a possible extension in the future to lightweight professional applications cannot be ruled out. This might give a boost to a scenario that, from a strictly technological point of view, is certainly not prohibitive.