HOW MDL DRIVES VALUE WITH EPTURA
MDL scales globally while maintaining 100% uptime
Maritime Developments streamlined its asset management across a complex, global fleet, reducing administrative burdens, improving reliability, and enabling faster, data-driven decisions for high-value offshore projects.
Customer profile
Maritime Developments: UK experts in marine infrastructure and coastal engineering solutions
Industry
Engineering
# employees149
LocationHeadquartered in Aberdeen, UK
Maritime Developments (MDL) provides flexible lay and retrieval solutions for the oil, gas, and renewable energy industries. Operating vessels and equipment worldwide, MDL delivers engineering solutions for highly complex offshore projects where precision, reliability, and safety are critical.
The company’s fleet includes high-value assets such as cable lay tensioners, reel drive systems, and subsea cables. These intricate machines, made up of hundreds of components — including hydraulic motors, tension monitors, fibre optic strands, and insulation layers — must be meticulously maintained to operate flawlessly in harsh offshore environments, where any downtime can be extremely costly. MDL continues to uphold its promise to clients of providing the safest, most reliable, and highest-quality equipment.
Our equipment goes on the back of vessels, and predominantly those vessels are expensive and our equipment forms part of a spread. If the equipment isn’t working, the vessel generally isn’t working, which has a huge financial impact to our clients.
"The challenge
Scaling operations exposed maintenance inefficiencies
1
Complex assets to manage
Scaling made it harder to manage large, intricate equipment efficiently
2
Inefficient manual maintenance tracking
Technicians spent hours inputting data into spreadsheets
3
Risk of operational disruptions
Manual processes increased the chance of costly maintenance errors
As MDL expanded into new sectors, and project complexity increased, traditional maintenance processes could no longer keep pace. Asset data was scattered across spreadsheets, emails, and word documents, or relied on team members’ memory. This manual approach was inefficient, increasing the risk of errors, and made it difficult to maintain consistent, up-to-date visibility across MDL’s global fleet.
Offshore technicians spent considerable time manually logging maintenance data after each project. This created delays between work being completed offshore and actionable reporting, preventing timely, data-driven decisions. The administrative burden also distracted technicians from high-value technical work, slowing operations further.
MDL needed a system that could scale with growth, deliver immediate insights, and standardize processes across all locations.
One of the big issues with the previous manual method was the latency between information coming from where work was carried out and when we’d receive it and could make decisions. We wanted technical experts to have immediately actionable data instead of being buried in documents and emails.
"The solution
Centralized asset management for global operations
To address the challenges of scaling operations and maintaining reliability, MDL partnered with Eptura to implement a centralized asset management solution. The system provides real-time visibility across the entire asset portfolio, including parent-child associations for complex machinery, enabling the team to manage hundreds of high-value assets with precision.
The platform allows MDL to:
- Centralize asset data: Consolidate all asset information in one place for consistent, up-to-date visibility.
- Track work orders: Monitor work orders in real time to ensure maintenance tasks are visible and actionable.
- Enable mobile maintenance: Offshore technicians log work directly via iPads, making reporting timely and consistent.
- Predict maintenance needs: Use historical and live data to forecast component wear, extend asset life, and optimize maintenance schedules.
- Monitor the full portfolio: Track all assets, assess critical work orders, and plan ahead for upcoming projects.
Eptura solution
Eptura Asset
Business Intelligence (BI) reports
The Eptura systems allows us to keep control of our assets, helping us know, plan, and understand the costs associated with maintaining them. It has given us a holistic understanding of all our assets and visibility into all the work that needs to be done.
"The Results
Driving operational efficiency and ensuring 100% uptime
Operational efficiency results:
- Prevention of unexpected equipment failures
- Greater visibility of asset performance
- Smoother workflows with fewer operational disruptions
Cost and productivity results:
- Reduction in overall maintenance costs
- Reduced urgent repairs and parts replacements
- Significant time savings through real-time maintenance data logging
Since implementing Eptura Asset, MDL has achieved significant operational and financial improvements, enabling the company to scale while maintaining its commitment to 100% uptime and best-in-class equipment for clients. The platform provides real-time visibility across the fleet, enabling MDL to track more than 1,000 work orders each month and maintain consistent, reliable performance across complex offshore projects.
By reducing administrative work by 50% and saving technicians over eight hours per week through mobile-enabled logging, MDL has freed up its technical experts to focus on high-value maintenance tasks. The system also supports global scalability, allowing assets across multiple countries to be tracked, maintained, and deployed with confidence. Predictive maintenance and data-driven lifecycle management ensure components are replaced only when necessary, extending asset life, reducing costs, and minimizing downtime. Altogether, these improvements enhance reliability for clients, protect high-value project investments, and streamline operations for a stronger, more efficient global business.
The system is a necessary tool if you want to scale. Since implementing Eptura, the biggest value I recognize is that I can, with confidence, understand and demonstrate the serviceability of our global fleet.
"