What is 'yacht management'? What would the scope be? Maintenance, inventory, purchasing, compliance, accounts are all in there as basic requirements, and they each have their lexicon. The cart (the user requirements) is being pulled by a team comprised of bulls, asses, horses, huskies, and the occasional decent-sized engine. Second is the un-business-like approach to the problem. This raises complexity and, while not too hard for the smaller one-trick-pony applications, the challenges of feature-upgrade, user management, latency on comms devices, and security means that any 'suite' worthy of the name is going to cost several hundreds of thousands of euros to develop. We require software to be offline and synched with shore servers, in order to report to management and owners, to tie in with shipyards. The margins are not there to reward the entrepreneur. No-one seems prepared to take the financial risk associated with writing a full yacht management 'suite'. How hard can it be? In my view, there are several restrictions.įirst, the very nature of our niche market implies small market, which implies small revenues, which in turn curtails the business ambitions of the software providers. The niche market in which we all operate provides us with a huge opportunity to standardise: the actors are few the data is relatively straightforward the single language of the sea is officially English. As we software providers vie for market share, using different technologies, and without a set of standards, the consumer is often confused and feels un-served. However, in response to the question of one package to cover all areas, our scattered individualistic approaches are not helping the industry across the board. Without doubt, the use of software in yachting has evolved and increased in the last twenty or so years, and we software suppliers continue to respond to the increasingly burdensome regulations, which require record keeping and reporting. As the team that launched Techman in 1999, unsurprisingly, we have a few reflections to add to SuperyachtNews' ' future of yacht management software' article, which stemmed from meetings at the 2016 Global Superyacht Forum.
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