Which CMMS for a Fleet of Ten Ships?
Ten ships is an awkward size. Too many to keep running maintenance in a shared folder: at that volume nobody holds the whole picture any more and omissions become statistical. Too few, on the other hand, to justify deploying an integrated suite designed for owners with several hundred units, along with the project, the budget and the dedicated team that implies.
The question is therefore not which software is best, but which one fits this size. It turns on four points: what each option really costs, what the tool must be able to do on board, how existing records are migrated, and how long before the whole fleet is genuinely under control.
The essentials
Below roughly fifty ships, an integrated suite costs more in project work than it returns in functionality.
A dedicated CMMS is priced per ship per month: BoatOn Book's professional plans run from 39 to 299 euros excluding tax.
Three questions belong in every demonstration: offline logging, the compliance output, and migration of existing records.
The most common cause of failure is not the software but the migration of the existing maintenance plan.
Why ten ships changes the nature of the problem
With two or three units a technical superintendent holds the fleet in his head. He knows which engine is approaching a due point, which certificate expires in spring, which vessel has a recurring fault. That personal knowledge is a genuine asset, and it works.
It does not scale. At ten ships the number of tracked items runs into the hundreds, crews rotate, and information travels by message and telephone call. The classic symptom is not a dramatic breakdown: it is discovering, three days before an audit, that a reading has been missing for eight months on a vessel nobody was explicitly responsible for.
What each option really costs
The spreadsheet looks free, and that is its commercial strength. Its real cost sits elsewhere: in the hours spent consolidating files, in jobs done twice for want of a reliable history, and in the time it takes to prepare for an audit. These are diffuse costs, never budgeted, which is precisely why they persist.
Integrated suites, by contrast, generally do not publish their pricing: the figure is built by quotation, according to the number of ships, the modules selected and above all the integration work. The line to watch is not the licence but that last item, and the delay it implies before the first real use.
A subscription-based dedicated CMMS is reasoned per ship per month. BoatOn Book's professional plans run from 39 to 299 euros excluding tax per month per ship, depending on scope. Across ten units the annual order of magnitude takes seconds to work out, which has the merit of making the decision comparable to an existing budget line rather than to a capital project.
Three questions to put in the demonstration
Show me an offline entry. Ask to put the phone into flight mode, log a job, then restore the network and watch what syncs. It is the most discriminating demonstration there is, and the one least often offered unprompted.
Produce the statement an auditor will ask for. Maintenance plan, records of execution, certificates, for one named ship, in a single action. If the answer involves an export and then formatting, that output will never be produced under real conditions.
How do you take over my current plan? Have the migration quoted, the supporting person named, and a deadline fixed. A vague answer here announces a project that will drift.
The real risk in the project
A fleet in service is never a blank page. It has a maintenance plan, histories of uneven quality, documents scattered between shore office and ships, and habits. Migrating that existing material decides success more often than the choice of software does.
Two symmetrical mistakes lie in wait. Insisting on migrating everything, including ten years of dubious history, stalls the project for months. Migrating nothing at all strips the fleet of its technical memory and leaves the tool unable to justify anything in its first year. The workable path is to migrate the current plan and documents in full, and to rebuild history only for critical equipment.
Deciding without spending a quarter on it
A simple method serves for this kind of decision. Take one ship representative of the fleet, configure her properly in the tool during the trial period, and have the crew concerned use it through a few weeks of ordinary operation. What you learn there is worth more than three sales demonstrations.
The deciding criterion is in fact that one, and it rarely appears on comparison grids: does the crew fill the tool in without being reminded? Software seafarers feed produces a reliable history. Software they work around produces a false one, which is more dangerous than none at all, since it invites confidence.
The general criteria are set out in our article on the marine CMMS, the financial orders of magnitude in the return on investment calculator, and the functional comparisons on our pages devoted to BASSnet and AMOS.
Illustrative photograph.
