After the eventful morning at Megaway Shipyard, some of us proceeded on to MTU Asia, located just a stone’s throw away at 1 Benoi Place. (Since we were already in the far far west of Singapore, we figured we might as well maximize the opportunity to visit one of our earliest Founding members’ premises).
MTU is a world renowned brand in marine propulsion, known for its technologically advanced products and excellent reputation in after sales service support. Its world class product support and state-of-the-art logistic and workshop facilities are geared to render superior service to superyachts, including refit evaluation, budget preparation, project management for all engine refit programs.
Established in 1974, MTU Asia Pte Ltd has the regional responsibility of Marketing, Application Engineering, Sales and After-sales Support and Training. From a humble beginning of just 9 employees, the company has grown into a workforce of 190 employees (300 employees in the region), evolving from a small logistic centre into a regional distribution and support centre.
MTU Asia is ISO 9001 certified since 2001. And it is not only supporting an engine population of more than 30,000 units in the region but also providing support for MTU and DDC range of products for 22 countries in the Asian region.
We were guided through 9 stations in the impressive MTU factory. Station No. 1 was the Warehouse - Incoming Section. MTU receives on average 10 containers per month and 12 shipments of airfreight per week. Items received include a range of bolts, nuts, washers, pistons, cylinder liners, crankshafts, crankcases to complete engines such as 18V2000G82. MTU has been using the Automated Storage & Retrieval System (ASRS I, Miniload System) since January 1998. It is a 5-crane system with a total of 9,628 bins that has a storage capacity of 496 M3. Yellow-colored Volatile Corrosion Inhibitors (VCI) plastic bags and sheets are used to protect spare parts against corrosion.
We witnessed the binning of spare parts into ASRS I, miniload system. SAP automatically assigns the parts to be stored before downloading data to ASRS I. The binner carries out preparation of the item and selects the size for each spare part. The ASRS automatically selects the bin to be stored. After binning, the ASRS uploads the information back to SAP. The whole process is completely integrated, online real-time and is therefore paperless. Amazing!
We went on to the Outgoing Section of the warehouse, the Quality Control Room, the Failure Analysis Centre, the Service Centre (Workshop), Testing Room, Training Centre, Automated Storage & Retrieval System II (ASRS II) where we witnessed the demonstration of the withdrawal of a 18V2000 series engine from the Engine Storage System.
The final station is the newly upgraded Test Bench. Equipped with a highly modern digital monitoring system, it has the capability to test a wide range of MTU’s engine products up to the 1163 engine models (max: 6600 KW).
Surely, this trip to MTU Asia was an engineer’s dream come true!
