Capture Every Ship Repair Quote, Project, and Variation — Never Leave Revenue on the Table

Two numbers that decide the yard

A ship repair yard lives on two numbers: how much of its quoted work it wins, and how much of the work it actually does ends up on an invoice. Both leak when the business runs on email and spreadsheets. A quote goes out and is never followed up. A job is delivered with three variations that nobody captured.

The money is not lost to competitors so much as to disorganisation. HelloGrowthCRM puts enquiries, projects, approvals, and variations on one record per owner so the yard can see, and bill, everything it does.

A pipeline the yard can read

Every repair starts as an enquiry, and most yards have no clear view of how many are open or how many convert. HelloGrowthCRM gives each enquiry the owner, vessel, and scope, and moves it from enquiry to quoted to won or lost.

The result is a pipeline the yard can actually read — what is outstanding, what is landing, and which kinds of jobs are worth quoting harder for.

One live view for every team

When a vessel is in dock, every hour counts, and the schedule cannot live on a whiteboard that only the project manager understands. HelloGrowthCRM tracks each project through docked, in progress, sea trial, and delivered.

The commercial team, the planners, and the superintendents share one live view of the workload instead of three different versions of it.

Chase approvals during the project

A vessel cannot sail until class is satisfied, and a single outstanding approval can hold delivery and rack up berth costs. HelloGrowthCRM tracks each class item against its vessel and society — DNV, Lloyd's, ABS and the rest — and flags what is still outstanding.

The yard chases approvals during the project rather than discovering the gap on delivery day.

Bill every variation you do

Most repair profit hides in variations: the extra steel, the added staging, the unplanned overhaul once the casing is open. Work that is not recorded the moment it is agreed tends to be done for free. HelloGrowthCRM logs each variation against its project with a value and a status — open, approved, invoiced — so the yard bills the work it does.

Keeping enquiries, projects, approvals, and variations on one shared record is how a repair business protects both ends of its margin at once.

Three quotes, one dock, no surprises

A repair yard can hire more welders, but it cannot conjure another graving dock. Every quote the commercial team sends is implicitly a promise about a docking window — and when quotes live in email, nobody notices that three of them promise the same fortnight until two of them are won. The result is either a vessel waiting at anchorage while the owner's patience and the yard's reputation drain away, or a discounted rework of the schedule that costs real margin.

HelloGrowthCRM attaches the required docking window to each enquiry, so the pipeline view doubles as a forward view of dock demand. The commercial manager sees which open quotes compete for the same slot, which windows are effectively sold, and where a gap in the schedule means a job worth chasing harder. Quoting becomes a capacity decision made with the dock master, not a gamble discovered on award day.

One story, whoever answers the phone

During a docking, the owner's superintendent is the yard's most important audience — standing on the dock bottom at 7 AM, copied on every class item, and reporting back to an owner who thinks in day rates. Superintendents forgive delays they were warned about and remember forever the ones they discovered themselves. When yard communication runs through whichever manager happens to pick up, the superintendent gets three versions of the schedule and trusts none of them.

HelloGrowthCRM logs every call, email, and WhatsApp with the owner's team on the project record, and sends automated updates at each stage change — docked, in progress, sea trial, delivered. When a variation needs sign-off, the request goes out with photos and a value and comes back as a timestamped approval, which is precisely the paper the yard needs when the final account is disputed months later. A superintendent who was informed all the way through signs the redelivery protocol faster — and brings the next vessel back.

Long-lead items, visible early

Repair schedules are broken less often by labour than by a spare that is still on a shelf in another country. The tail shaft seal, the cooler bundle, the specialist coating crew — each was an RFQ someone sent from a personal inbox, and each goes invisible until the planning meeting where its absence becomes everyone's emergency. HelloGrowthCRM logs procurement quotes against the job: supplier, price, lead time, and status from enquiry to ordered to received.

The project manager sees which long-lead items are still unordered while the vessel is burning dock days, and chases them in week one instead of week three. At invoicing, every bought-in cost is already on the record — so subcontracted staging and OEM service engineers are billed to the job rather than quietly absorbed into the yard's overhead.

Every open item, against the clock

Every repair contract has a date with teeth: the agreed redelivery, after which the conversation turns to who pays for each extra day the vessel spends alongside. An off-hire vessel loses her owner money daily, which is why the last week of a docking is a countdown run in public. The yards that redeliver on time are not the ones that work fastest — they are the ones that can see, at any moment, every item still standing between the vessel and the gangway coming up: two class items awaiting the surveyor, one variation unsigned, sea trial results outstanding.

HelloGrowthCRM keeps the redelivery date on the project record with open approvals and variations visible against it, so the daily production meeting works from a live list rather than a recollection. The delivery-day panic becomes a Tuesday checklist — and the final invoice goes out while the work is fresh, not six weeks later when half the variations have gone soft.

Monday: a superintendent emails about a bulk carrier needing rudder bush renewal and hull treatment, with a preferred docking window eight weeks out. The enquiry becomes a record — vessel, scope, window, owner — and the commercial manager sees at once that the window clashes with a quoted tanker job, so the quote goes out offering the adjacent slot with a firm price and a three-day follow-up task attached. Thursday: no reply, the nudge fires, and the superintendent responds with two scope questions that are answered the same afternoon — every exchange logged. The job is won in week two. On docking day the record flips to a project: class items registered against the vessel's society, stage set to docked, automated update sent to the owner's team. In week one the rudder bush measurement reveals more wear than surveyed; the variation is logged with photos and a value the same day, approved by WhatsApp within 48 hours, and sits in the approved column instead of a foreman's notebook. The long-lead bush casting shows as ordered with a confirmed date, two class items are chased mid-project rather than on delivery morning, and the vessel sails on the agreed date. The final account — base scope plus three approved variations — goes out within the week, and nothing the yard did goes unbilled. That is the entire argument for running a repair yard on records instead of memory.