Marine CMMS: What It Is, How to Set One Up and What to Ask Before You Buy

Preventive, corrective, condition-based

Corrective maintenance fixes things after they fail. It is unavoidable, but expensive when it happens mid-season with bookings on the calendar. Preventive maintenance services equipment before it fails, on a date or at a number of hours, and it is the core of any CMMS. Condition-based maintenance acts on measured condition: visible wear, an oil analysis result, a temperature creeping up. On boats the line blurs. With an hour meter, much of the preventive work follows actual use rather than the calendar: a boat that goes out every day reaches its service points far sooner than one used only at weekends. A good marine CMMS therefore runs both clocks, hours and dates, and keeps a record of corrective jobs so that repeat failures stand out.

Marine CMMS or ship's PMS: two tools for two worlds

The ISM Code, made mandatory by the SOLAS Convention for passenger ships and for cargo ships of 500 gross tonnage and above, requires a safety management system with documented maintenance procedures. Shipping companies, and large commercial yachts that come under the Code depending on their flag and use, meet that requirement with a planned maintenance system: a full equipment hierarchy, spares and inventory, and an audit trail for flag and class surveys. Those systems are powerful, and they need a crew aboard to keep them up to date. A small-fleet marine CMMS serves a different crowd: rental and charter fleets, sailing schools, boat management companies, and workshops and yards looking after motor launches, sailing yachts, RIBs and private yachts. The need is more immediate: which boat is due for what, who is doing what this week, what each boat costs to run. Captain Crews sits in this second group. It is not built to be the regulatory PMS of a vessel operating under the ISM Code.

• Ship's PMS: ISM compliance, spares inventory, flag and class audits, a crew aboard to run the system.
• Small-fleet marine CMMS: many small and mid-size boats, engine-hour servicing, workshop and subcontractors, owners to keep informed.

Setting up a marine CMMS in five steps

A CMMS is only as good as the data you start with. A few half-days of setup, done in order, beat typing in the entire history before you begin.

• Step 1, the fleet: import your boat list from the spreadsheet you already have, check the preview, then fill in the essentials (registration, hull number, owner).
• Step 2, the engines: for each engine and generator, the make, model, serial number, current hours and the next service point taken from the manufacturer's schedule.
• Step 3, dated deadlines: documents and safety gear (extinguishers, life raft, EPIRB, flares) with their dates, so none of them depends on someone's memory.
• Step 4, recurring jobs: write once the checklists that keep coming round (annual service, laying up, recommissioning, monthly checks) and set how often they repeat.
• Step 5, costs: attach each supplier invoice to the right boat as it arrives, so you get totals per boat and per category without re-typing.

What a CMMS should show you every Monday morning

Judge a CMMS less by its feature list than by what it tells you in five minutes at the start of the week. If any of these answers still means opening three files or making two phone calls, the system is badly set up or wrong for you. They also make a good test during a trial: ask the vendor to show them on your own boats.

• Boats out of service today, and why: in the workshop, under maintenance, laid up ashore.
• Engines approaching their next service point in hours, and those already past it.
• Dated deadlines this month: documents, extinguishers, life raft, EPIRB.
• Jobs that are late or blocked, with the reason they are blocked.
• Invoices received but not yet attached to a boat.

Ten questions to ask a marine CMMS vendor

A demo always shows software at its best. These questions pull the conversation back to your working day. Ask them in writing, and ask to trial the system on two or three of your real boats rather than on demo data.

• Engine hours: can we track several engines per boat, generators included, and how many service points per engine at once?
• Hour readings: who records them, and how? Typed in, captured during a job, or read automatically?
• Recurring work: do checklists repeat by themselves, weekly, monthly or yearly?
• Parts: free text on the job, a catalogue with part numbers, or real stock control?
• On the pontoon: does it work on a phone, and what happens with no signal?
• Permissions: who sees what between the office, technicians, skippers, owners and subcontractors?
• Owners: do they get access, and can some jobs stay internal?
• Getting started: can we import the fleet and the service history from Excel?
• Getting out: can we export all our data, in which format and how often?
• Pricing: per boat, per foot of length or per user, and what happens to the bill if the fleet doubles?

Keep maintenance and the team together

In a small marine business, the people who service the boats also clock their hours, move between marinas and answer to owners. A CMMS that ignores the team means running a second tool for time tracking, and re-typing who worked on which boat and for how long. So add two questions to the list: does closing a job feed the technician's time record, and can an owner see what was done to their boat without phoning the yard?

How Captain Crews answers, limits included

Captain Crews, marine management software, answers like this: several engines per boat, each with its next service point in hours, flagged 100 hours ahead and again once overdue; hours recorded during a job; work templates that repeat weekly, monthly or yearly; Excel import of the fleet with a preview, and of the service history; an owner portal where some jobs can stay internal; closed jobs added to the technician's daily log; a ZIP export (CSV, PDF, original files), complete once a month; pricing per user, from €5 per user per month; use on a phone, iOS and Android apps included. Its limits: one hours-based service point per engine at a time, parts as free text with no stock control, and no offline mode.

Five mistakes that sink a CMMS rollout

Most failed rollouts fail for the same handful of reasons, and none of them is technical.

• Trying to enter every past job before going live: the team runs out of energy before seeing any benefit.
• Filling in service points with generic intervals instead of each engine maker's schedule.
• Nobody owning the hour-meter readings: without readings, the alerts mean nothing.
• Checklists so long that nobody really ticks them.
• Closing jobs with no category, parts or time spent, which leaves the history useless.