The largest service exporter in Finland
From the remote monitoring facilities in Vaasa, Wärtsilä’s experts monitor the efficiency of thousands of engines worldwide, around the clock, including those of the world’s largest cruise company, Carnival Corporation. In early 2017, Wärtsilä and Carnival Corporation concluded a strategic cooperation agreement and, as a consequence, 79 of Carnival Corporation’s luxury cruisers are now sailing the seven seas under Wärtsilä’s attentive surveillance.
By monitoring and analysing the digital data stream from the engines, the cruisers’ need for maintenance can be effectively anticipated. The utilisation of the industrial Internet also allows the customer themselves to follow the state of their equipment via cloud computing services. In addition to monitoring, the agreement between Wärtsilä and Carnival Corporation includes the planning and implementation of all the vessels’ maintenance, carried out with the help of digital solutions.
The Wärtsilä Corporation is an excellent example of a traditional industrial enterprise transforming into a service company. Its Services unit’s turnover is more than EUR 2.2 billion, which is almost half of the entire company’s revenue. And, as the majority of this global industrial giant’s marine industry and power plant customers are located outside Finland, it is safe to say that today Wärtsilä is the largest exporter of services in the country.
If the forecasts about the Services unit’s growth come true, Wärtsilä’s transformation from an equipment manufacturer to a service provider will accelerate further. Without new service models that exploit digitalisation, cooperation agreements such as the one with Carnival Corporation would not be possible. Remote monitoring and other digitalisation solutions have also enabled Wärtsilä to gradually shift from the ‘fix it when it breaks’ thinking to the predictive maintenance model.
For many industrial enterprises, the transformation into a service provider is facilitated by the fact that the lifecycle services offered are extended to existing customers and buyers of equipment. The same holds true in Wärtsilä’s case, as their service customers mainly consist of their Marine and Energy Solutions customers. The 12-year agreement between Wärtsilä and Carnival Corporation is a mark of a new kind of strategic partnership whose objective is to allow both organisations to continuously improve their performance.
“We are very excited to develop our long-term partnership into a more strategic direction. Both Wärtsilä and Carnival Corporation are committed to investing significantly in this partnership as well as to develop our cooperation in the long run,” says President of Services and Executive Vice President of Wärtsilä, Pierpaolo Barbone.
