Ship Repair Yard Software: Custom Build or Off the Shelf

What the off-the-shelf products in this category actually do well

Say the honest part first: most yards should not build. If you turn under roughly twenty vessels a year with no dock of your own, your scarce resource is skilled people, not slots, and a spreadsheet with a strictly enforced variation form will hold. Spend the money on plant.

SpecTec AMOS, SERTICA and ShipNet are mature maritime systems and it is worth being clear about what they are good at. Equipment hierarchies, planned maintenance, component histories, procurement and requisition workflow, certificate and survey tracking across a fleet. When an owner sends you a repair specification, there is a fair chance it came out of one of them. They are competent and they are not the problem.

The general contracting and enterprise resource planning (ERP) packages that yards try next are also genuinely capable. Job costing, purchase commitment control, subcontractor retention, progress billing and a general ledger that reconciles. If your yard is losing money because nobody posts labour to a job number, buying one of those and enforcing the discipline will fix more than a bespoke system will, and faster.

There is a floor below all of it too. A single berth yard doing three or four jobs at a time with one estimator does not need software. It needs a rate card written down, a numbering scheme everyone uses, and a variation form the superintendent signs before the plate is cut. Buying a platform for that is a subscription in search of a problem.

Two smaller purchases are worth making before anything bespoke. A document management system that holds the specification, the class correspondence and the photographs against a job number, and a time capture terminal at the gate that posts hours to that same number. Between them they fix the two most common causes of an unprovable final account, and together they cost a fraction of a build. If you have not done both, a custom system will inherit the same missing inputs and produce prettier gaps.

Where they stop: growth work agreed on the dock bottom

Here is the workflow every generic product models badly, and it is the whole commercial risk of your business. The specification is written before anyone opened the tank. Blasting starts, the class surveyor taps the plating, and forty tonnes of steel renewal becomes sixty-eight. The owner superintendent nods on the dock bottom, a foreman writes it on the back of a job card, and four months later the owner accounts department disputes the extra because your evidence is handwriting and a man who has since flown home.

A defensible variation needs seven things: the owner specification reference, a description in the owner language, the measured quantity, the contracted rate, a photograph taken before the plate was cut, the date and time, and the attending superintendent signature captured on site. Yards collect two of the seven, on paper, then scan the paper.

Fleet systems were built for the other side of the transaction. They do not price growth work against a negotiated yard rate card, they do not capture a signature in a double bottom tank with no signal, and they do not produce a final account that survives a dispute. Contracting packages assume the scope was known when the contract was signed, which in ship repair is never true, and that single assumption is the entire problem.

The second workflow they miss is the dock plan. Twenty-eight extra tonnes of steel is also extra days, and those days push the vessel behind, whose delivery date is tied to a charter. Nothing joins the variation to the undocking date. Add the constraints that only exist in a yard: tidal gates for pumping down and flooding, coating application windows where the manufacturer sets temperature and humidity limits, shared crane availability across berths, and the class surveyor attendance calendar. A generic scheduler models tasks and dependencies. It does not know you cannot paint tonight.

The arithmetic: per user licensing against cost per vessel docked

Run this on your own numbers rather than a vendor quote. Take the annual licence and support for whatever you use now, add the estimating and administrative hours spent reconciling three numbering systems at final account, and divide by vessels docked. That is your true cost per job.

Worked example to replace with yours. Twenty-five seats at $95 per user per month is $28,500 a year. Add one estimator week per vessel across forty vessels reconciling owner specification items to work orders and invoice lines, at a loaded $1,800 a week, and you have $72,000 in hidden labour. Total roughly $100,000 annually, or $2,500 per vessel docked.

Against that, a $110,000 first release with year two at 17 percent costs about $185,000 over three years. The crossover in this category is not seat count. It is around 25 to 30 vessels docked a year, or the point at which growth work exceeds roughly fifteen percent of your typical final account, whichever comes first.

The number nobody puts in the model is disputes. A single settled final account written down by five percent on a large steel job can exceed a year of licensing. If you have taken that hit twice in three years, your arithmetic already crossed.

What a custom build actually costs

In Digital Heroes delivery experience, a first release covering specification import and mapping, quotation against a rate card, job numbering, dock and berth planning, and mobile variation capture with photographs and signature runs $70,000 to $150,000 in 12 to 18 weeks. That is a system your estimators and dock foremen use on the next vessel, not a pilot. A full yard platform adding timesheet and stores posting, subcontractor commitment control, permit to work and gate access, class attendance scheduling, progressive invoicing and an owner portal runs $180,000 to $450,000 phased over 6 to 14 months.

Migration is 10 to 25 percent of the build. Open jobs, the customer and vessel register, and the rate card structures carry over cleanly. Historical job costing rarely does, because it was posted against a numbering scheme you are about to abandon. Load closed jobs as read only archive and stop paying to clean them.

Year two runs 15 to 20 percent of build cost annually, covering hosting, support during dock periods rather than office hours, and change. What pushes you up the band here specifically: multiple docks with genuinely different constraints, offline capture inside tanks, and multi currency or multi language if you serve international owners with a mixed workforce.

The four situations where building wins

Regulatory and contractual fit comes first. Class attendance is not a date, it is a window with credit conditions, and a surveyor attending opportunistically during a scheduled docking is worth planning for. If you take naval or government work, certified payroll and prevailing wage records sit alongside it, and both belong in the same job record as the labour hours.

Scale economics is second: the 25 to 30 vessel figure above, reached sooner if your dock is the constraint rather than your workforce.

Third is a workflow that is your competitive advantage. Printing a final account in the owner own specification numbering, so item 4.12.3 reads back as item 4.12.3 rather than as job 1188 line 40, ends most disputes before they start. Owners notice. Repeat work follows the yards that are easy to settle with, and that is a commercial edge no packaged product will hand you.

Fourth is integration sprawl. Count them: estimating, clocking or time capture, stores and purchasing, subcontractor invoicing, accounting, and the dock schedule. When three or more of those must agree before an invoice goes out, and the agreement currently happens in a workbook one person maintains, you are funding a build already.

How to decide in a week

Pick the last three vessels you delivered. For each, reconstruct one variation end to end. Find the owner specification reference, the measured quantity, the rate applied, the photograph, the timestamp and the signature. Give yourself twenty minutes per variation and stop when the twenty minutes are gone.

Count how many of the six you found. If you routinely land on three or fewer, and you needed to phone a foreman for any of them, you have your answer and you did not need a consultant to reach it. Then repeat the test on the dock plan: ask when the vessel two slots from now is scheduled to undock, and whether that date reflects the variations approved last week.

A yard that fails both tests is not short of software. It is short of a record, and a record is what you build.

One more hour well spent. Take a single completed job and run its margin three ways: by owner specification item, by pricing model, and by trade. Most yards cannot do it at all, and the ones that can usually find that steel renewal carries the job while staging and services quietly lose money, or exactly the reverse. Whichever way it falls, that number tells you which repair types you have been quoting cheap to win work you should have let go.

The last step is a paid discovery phase, which is the cheapest way to end the argument. Digital Heroes produces a signed product requirements document before any code exists: the variation data model, the rate card structures, dock constraints, integrations and acceptance criteria. You own it, and you can take it to any other firm on your shortlist and finally compare quotes for the same thing. We are wrong for you if you want the cheapest hourly rate, or if you dock fifteen vessels a year and want permission to build. We will tell you to fix the variation form instead.

Book a 30-minute call with Digital Heroes and get a written plan and a fixed quote within 48 hours.