International Boat Industry – June-July 2019

64 JUNE–JULY 2019 | International Boat Industry ibinews.com

Strategy & Finance

PROFILE | OCEANCO

 Oceanco’s 109m Bravo Eugenia, built in

2019 with exterior design by Nuvolari Lenard

C

hange always means leaving

your comfort zone and Dutch

superyacht maker Oceanco is

good at that. In 2015, it outsourced all

of its internal and external logistics to a

Rotterdam-area transport company. In a

related move, Oceanco is now overseeing

a massive digital transformation that

began in 2017 and may be completed

before 2023.

The Herculean undertaking has

revealed both the pitfalls and benefits

of embracing a more efficient, future-

proof ICT strategy. It is change Oceanco

embraces as standing still often equals

falling behind.

Until 2017, electronic data storage

and retrieval “ran parallel to our business

operations, instead of being integrated

into them,” says Jaap Kouwenhoven,

Oceanco’s Knowledge & Innovation

director. As Oceanco morphed from

a matrix organisation into one in

which each yacht has its own project

supporting integrated applications, makes

it possible to see 3D models of spaces and

objects, learn about their status, degree of

completion, scheduled date of installation

etc. If you see a lamp modeled, you click on

it to see its size, voltage, amount of lumen,

delivery and installation date and from

which warehouse the lamp will come.”

The ship and yacht building sectors

“have one thing in common,” says Geert

Schouten of ICT Strategy. “Millions

are lost in the search for the right

information. About 30% of all work in

new-build, conversion and maintenance

projects consist of unnecessary searching.

Searching and more searching for data.”

He adds that many maritime

companies with vast databases resist

change and remain strangers to the digital

transformation. They use Word, Excel, PDF

and “other non-suitable data processors,”

he says. “Searching for the right data is

then needlessly complex. How can you

know for certain if your Word document is

THE DUTCH BUILDER’S RADICAL NEW DATA-DRIVEN IT SYSTEM ‘YACHTBUILDER’ IS SET

TO TRANSFORM THE WAY IT BUILDS ITS INCREASINGLY LARGE AND COMPLEX BOATS

WORDS: ROBERT WIELAARD

Oceanco makes ‘efficiency step’

into future-proof ICT strategy

organisation, Oceanco made IT a business

enabler and enhancer.

With the help of ICT Strategy – whose

Shipbuilder software handles large data

volumes of maritime companies – it built

and keeps developing its Yachtbuilder

program, a Shipbuilder derivative.

Crucially, Yachtbuilder is a data-driven

IT system, not a document-driven one.

“It means data is entered only once and in

only one place. So, it is always up to date,”

says Kouwenhoven. “In a document-driven

system, duplicate documents can end up in

different places and different versions.”

Oceanco’s emerging data-driven IT

eco-system supports a yacht’s construction

• from the commercial, design and build
  phases up to fleet support and beyond. It
  prevents multiple inputs and covers the
  entire lifecycle of a yacht, down to the
  smallest details.
  “We are talking about many
  thousands of items,” Kouwenhoven
  says. “Yachtbuilder, together with other

 IT manager Marek Misiewicz has

seen a big rise in Oceanco data users

 Oceanco’s Aquijo (85m)

under constuction

Photo: Tom van Oossanen