Yachting
and marine.
Yachting and marine
In yachting the problem is rarely a lack of data: it is that every job is planned as if it were the first. What AI brings here is memory, so that what happened on earlier jobs is to hand when you are quoting the next one.
A shipyard builds up years of job sheets, quotes, supplier delivery notes and photos of past work. All of it exists, and almost none of it is opened when a boat comes in that looks like one repaired three seasons ago. The quote is estimated from memory again, the overrun shows up halfway through the haul-out, and the real margin on the job is only known once the boat has been handed back.
Marinas and yacht clubs, the other side of this corner of the blue economy, repeat the pattern somewhere else. Berth occupancy, waiting lists and services are kept in spreadsheets that only their author understands. The data is there; what is missing is for it to do some work.
You don't need a three-year plan. A shipyard or a marina already holds the material for all three.
An assistant that searches past years' job sheets and quotes for jobs similar to the one being priced. It returns the real hours, the materials and the overrun on each, and the quote stops coming out of one person's memory.
Minimum and ideal levels per part that account for each supplier's real lead time and the shape of the season. It is the project that has most often been our way into a shipyard.
The history of past work, reports and specifications turned into something you can ask in plain language, with the source document cited in the answer. Know-how stops depending on who happens to be in the workshop that day.
Four steps, and one of them isn't technical: here the project competes with the season for the same people.
Not "refits", but a job that comes in several times a year: a haul-out with antifouling, or an engine service. A scope with enough past jobs to compare against.
Whether the job sheets are on paper, whether the photos live on the yard manager's phone, and whether supplier delivery notes can be matched to the job they went to. This step decides the rest.
In high season nobody can stop to explain how a refit is quoted, and the person who knows is exactly the one who can't stop. Their hours are booked with the season's calendar in hand.
With the margin per job in order, the archive of job sheets, quotes and photos can be asked in plain language. It stops depending on whoever has been longest in the workshop.
Everything we build, in the order it comes into yachting. You start with what is already written and filed, which here is almost everything.
Minimum and ideal levels for the parts store with each supplier's real lead time, and margin per haul-out while the boat is still on the hard. In a sector with long lead times, this is what people notice first.
See the product
Job sheets, haul-out reports and technical specifications you can question, with answers that cite the document. Quoting a refit no longer starts from zero.
See the product
Quotes that today are built by copying another one, berth contracts and services added or cancelled, prepared for you to review rather than write.
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Workshop, stores and invoicing connected. Without that, the margin on each job is calculated by hand and arrives after the boat has been handed back.
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Predicting how long a refit will take and what it will cost from how closely it resembles earlier ones. It needs several seasons of closed jobs with their real hours.
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The whole provisioning cycle, from what the workshop uses to the purchase order sent to the supplier. With four-month lead times, this is where the gain is largest.
See the product
The session where you decide whether the first project is the parts store, the history or the berths. For a shipyard and for a marina the answer is not the same.
See the productBoth, as well as yacht clubs, refit services and suppliers to the sector. They are different businesses and the entry point changes. In a shipyard the first project is usually in quoting and the stores. In a marina or a club, it is in berth management and in member and customer information.
We work with companies of 20 to 500 people, and many of our yachting clients sit at the lower end of that range. Size doesn't decide it: what decides it is whether there is a process that repeats and costs money every week. Calculating parts-store minimums or rebuilding quotes by hand meets both conditions with twenty people or with two hundred.
It is treated as what it is: sensitive information about a client who usually expects discretion as well. The architecture phase decides where each piece of data lives, what leaves the system and who can see what. All of that comes before choosing a model. When data must not leave, we work with privately hosted models.
More than it seems. Scanned haul-out reports, job sheets and specifications in PDF are exactly what a knowledge assistant works from. First you have to look at the volume and the condition: whether the scans are legible, whether there is a minimal folder structure and whether the important documents are complete.
It depends on the process and the state of the data, not on the sector. What we do say upfront is which number has to move, and that is agreed before we start: in provisioning it is usually the stock-out rate. Giving a date before opening your job sheets and purchase history would be guessing: in a shipyard, much of the timeline is set by the state of the haul-out files.
It does, and it is also the reason the work pays off here. In a seasonal business, a provisioning mistake can't be put right in August: you pay for all of it. That is why the minimum-stock calculation has to build in each supplier's real lead time and the curve of the season, not an annual average.
Whatever passes through your hands is: the quote you ask them for, the invoice they send you and the hours you charge to the haul-out. That is half the cost of a refit and the part least under control, because it arrives on paper and in different formats. What we don't do is get into the contractor's own system: we work with what they hand you.
