Scantrol Delivers AHC System Number 65

Scantrol has increase the volume of Active Heave Compensation (AHC) systems supplied and has delivered system number 65 in the line, reveals Rolf Krogh Hjelmeland, who is responsible for Scantrol’ s AHC products.

Over the last five years Scantrol has focused on making AHC technology available for all kind of winches and cranes, for both new and existing systems. Scantrol AHC has been delivered for applications with 500 kg to 150 ton lifting capacity and the company has supplied 65 AHC systems to customers worldwide. Over the last months, Scantrol has experienced an increasing interest which signals that the products are both cost-efficient and relevant even in a slow market, the company said.

Most of the recent orders are for adding AHC to existing winches and cranes. According o Scantrol , this can be a cost-efficient and value-adding solution for vessel owners to be competitive in a market with a limited number of new contracts. In order to get a contract in today’s market, the vessels are often required to have AHC equipment installed on board. For operators that do not have this technology the consequence can be that the vessel is excluded from the bidding process. Scantrol has experienced a growing interest for AHC upgrades during the last year, even for smaller vessels. In many cases, existing equipment can be upgraded without major adjustments of the physical components. An example of this is retrofit of Launch and Recovery Systems (LARS).

“For most ROV operations it will be sufficient to be able to compensate for some of the vessel motion to increase the weather window dramatically,” explained Hjelmeland.

In addition to the increasing interest for AHC retrofit, Scantrol said it has focused on building strong customer relations. Several of Scantrol’ s winch and crane customers are returning buyers that have become long-term partners through OEM agreements. The purpose with this agreement is to take advantage of mutual learning processes and ensure a successful and cost-efficient result for the end-user. In practice this means that all OEM-partners are given sufficient training to be able to perform most of the testing, commissioning and support on their own. Any unexpected issues should then be possible to solve using the Scantrol remote support solution. With this, Scantrol engineers can connect to the system and assist the users from the office in Bergen. The agreement also benefits Scantrol by building a better understanding of the customer’s products and the expectations from the users.

One of Scantrol’ s OEM customers states that the agreement allows the company to focus on the hydraulic and engineering requirements involved with the installation of AHC knowing that it has a very successful control solutions provider ready to meet the customer requirements. After working together with Scantrol since 2014 the natural step was to bond this relationship further and to use joint knowledge to work towards simple solutions to allow fitting and retro fitting of AHC to be both cost and time efficient for the end user.