Marine Work Ethics in Ft Lauderdale

Shipyard and services

Lars is absolute right. Here in Europe is the same situation and i think more
backhanders than in Ft. Lauderdale. Maybe a option is to collect the right Crew and do most of the services for yourself. Also here are some new refit Shipyards
like Cartagena and Marina Tarraco but we will see how the situation is there.

I for my self think that also a commercial Shipyard that is not specialized on yachts could also be an option.

I agree. with both statements. The Captain (aka PM) is directly responsable for cost/timeline effectiveness. It is the PM responsability to crack the wip when needed. I have seen many efficient projects in Ft. Lauderdale, but it directly reflected upon the leadership/motivatorship of the Captain/PM. I might suggest that seldom does being good at one mean being good at the other. If you feel that your yard period was inefficient, you may want to outsource a PM next time... or get better acquainted with Gant Chart and tracking progress of projects?!

added note: Capt C, one of the better PM/Capts I have seen was Capt. Bill H. of Starship. He was always ahead of schedule, underbudget, and well managed. You should maybe catch up with him and ask for some pointers!

Yards

Mariners

The trick with yard is to write a specific list of work to be carried out and go into depth of detail on what you want. and write it in a contract.

Also any extras, for instance cranage, the next thing to do is watch them like hawks, and keep a detail record of comings and goings. Find out what people do and when they come on and off the job. It pays to hire extra people to do this.
Control the purchasing ie paint, engine parts, navigation equipment.yards will add percentages....this come in with pre planning a drydock list.

I once delayed paying a drydock bill for eighteen months and got it reduced by two thirds, main errors in labor costs and mistake the yard made to specification.


Europe has in general some highly skilled labor so docking time can be reduced. Holland and Germany are the best.

Captain Bob

Yards 2

Capt Chris

I know exactly how you feel, we do five years between docking and I recently painted a alleyway and relaid a floor down to the steel it took three weeks.

I had more than 115 people on board and the ship continued working, at the same time I had eco blasters working on the accomodation, they have been on board for three month so far.

We just had one of our vessel go $50 million over budget and we had a Project Engineer in charge.

Bob

50 over on one vessel?!!?!

Guys, yard periods start long before the ship/yacht arrives. As a Captain or PM you have months of planning logistics prior to drying her belly. In the instance of a $2 million or a hardly believable $50 Million refit there should be a expanded Gant chart posted for your contractors to know they are being tracked for efficiency of task. You can also break down each individual task into its components for each contractor.

It the example of Engineer gone AWOL. The yard realized the lack of managment and it is their business to generate revenue. Sometimes they pad man-hours, and charge for every thing they can. Change orders can be costly, and purchasing items outside thier duties can also cost.

A good PM should always get mutiple quotes for pricing and availability, and hold their contractors to a high accountability with performance criteria in the contract for service. It is also good to get them to itemize all costs and have them provide their own estimations of timeline in Gant format. The second side to that coin is paying for exceptional work. If they accomplish ahead of schedule there should be a performance bonus.

One more point, It is not always beneficial to award the contract to the LOWEST bidder. More times than not, when someone underbids in this industry the smaller guy often puts his business under. When he can't complete the project, the PM is forced to goto the next lowest bidder and thus ends up with poor results and often the highest price.

i wonder what the budget was that $50 mm is considered an "overage"?

Maybe it was 50,000,000 indonesian rupiah?

project management is indeed no.1

if contractors have not completed a similar sized project before then they are not qualified to quote. their bid will not be realistic.

if you are dealing with many individual subcontractors rather than a yard which is experienced with that size of work then you better have a good project manager experienced in that level of work/size of project or things can get way out of hand. it looked cheaper and easier to organise it yourself with lots of subcontractors but it was not in the end, for instance.

Ripping out another subcontractors work to re-do another subcontractors work cos another item is needed can escalate cost incredibly.

also in Greece there is the same problem though. if you dont monitor like a hawk the invoices and sign off/complain daily they will be more than what you expected. You can bring all sorts of subcontractors to make the biggest project happen but you must be able to control it. anyway even in the big yards they are experts to add extras because your original repair specification was not detailed enough.

In many parts of the world there is a built in multiplier that one had better be aware of.
A 10M project ending up at 50M is just a 4X multiplier overage. I've seen as high as 12x

These people provide good basic information upon which you can estimate the multiplier when dealing with a business in a country with which you have no active business history. Saved me significantly....
http://www.transparency.org/