As with everything, prior planning goes a long way toward making a refit project stay on time and on budget. Due to increasing refit work globally, especially in the USA, yards have waning windows of opportunity. There’s a temptation among captains, owners, management companies, and more to squeeze in a project. But that will just lead to too many problems. Consider, too, that Eric Robert-Peillard, site director of the refit yard Monaco Marine in France says that overall, 70 percent of refit work is planned too late. Marine Management Limited (MML) is doing its part to keep clients, and its own team, on track. It’s created RefitPlanner.com and the related RefitPlanner app.
The app is simple to use. As part of your account, you, your captain, or representative enter the appropriate contacts for your team, plus specifications for your yacht. You also upload photos of your yacht. The next step: listing the tasks needing addressing by grouping them according to intuitive categories in a drop-down menu. Examples of RefitPlanner categories: Interior, Electrical and Electronics, Survey & Design, and Deck. Everything you add automatically uploads to RefitPlanner.com, too.
The MML team reviews your requested work list, then emails you when it’s time to start adding more details. MML will have a variety of questions, all sent and answerable via the app/website. For example, if you want to add sensors to external stairs, MML may ask, “Is additional lighting required?” Furtermore, the app and RefitPlanner.com both have messaging features, letting all users discuss more in depth. The messaging features even work with the images, letting you share comments more precisely. Taken together, the RefitPlanner features centralize all data and conversations, to create a more targeted refit planning package and budget estimation.
Captains and crew who’ve seen the app praise its usefulness. “I fully intend to use RefitPlanner.com onboard the 41-meter new build I am soon to be captain of,” says Capt. Jonathan Edgar, experienced in refits. He values how it lets you plan early and serves as “a single depository for information.” He also likes the “user-friendly way to consider every aspect of the vessel in terms of refit.”
The RefitPlanner app is available for iPads only; search for “refitplanner.” To see a demo, visit the RefitPlanner website.
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