ShipNet Alternatives for Ship Agency, Port Call and Shipyard Operations

Why an agency or a yard reopens the maritime suite question

For ship agencies the trigger is nearly always margin visibility on the port call. A vessel calls, you raise a proforma disbursement account, costs land from the port authority, towage, pilotage, launch services, surveyors, crew transport and a dozen small suppliers, and the final account settles weeks later. The question the principal asks is simple and the system often answers it slowly: what did we actually make on that call, and where did the estimate drift. When agents are rebuilding that answer in spreadsheets, the operational half of the suite is not doing its job, whatever the ledger says.

For repair yards the trigger is job costing. A vessel arrives with a specification, the work grows through variation orders, subcontractors and steel renewal, and the difference between a profitable dock and a painful one is whether variations were captured and agreed in real time or reconstructed afterwards. Generic project accounting handles the finance and misses the yard reality: work packages by trade, dock capacity, staging, and a superintendent who agrees changes on the deck plate at eleven at night. The third trigger, common to both, is multi office growth. One office with one currency and one entity is a solved problem. Six offices in five jurisdictions with intercompany billing is a different system altogether.

What a broad maritime ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) earns its money on

Financial coherence. When operations and accounting share a data model, revenue and cost land in the ledger without a nightly reconciliation ritual, intercompany transactions between your own offices behave predictably, multi currency exposure is visible, and the auditor gets a straight answer. Anybody who has run operations in one system and finance in another knows what that reconciliation costs in month end hours, and the cost is permanent.

Maritime specificity is the second strength. A general purpose ERP does not know what a disbursement account is, does not model a voyage, does not understand that a port call has a principal separate from the paying party, and cannot represent an agency network where you appoint sub agents. Suites built in this sector carry those concepts natively, and configuring a generic ERP to fake them is a project that usually ends badly. If you are tempted by a mainstream ERP because it looks modern, price in the cost of teaching it shipping before you compare.

Where a broad suite thins out

Breadth is the trade. A suite covering chartering, operations, technical, crewing and finance is unlikely to be the strongest tool in any single lane, and the lane where you compete is exactly where you will feel it. For an agency that lane is speed and accuracy on the port call and clarity for principals. For a yard it is variation capture and live job cost. Suites tend to be strongest where the money is recorded and thinnest where the work is done.

The second thinning point is the field edge. Port agency is executed by people at a berth with a phone, and yard supervision happens on the dock, not at a desk. Capturing a boat note, a timesheet, a variation, a photograph of damage, at the moment it happens, is a mobile user experience problem, and it is usually the weakest part of an otherwise solid suite. The third is reporting flexibility. Principal facing reporting, per port and per principal profitability, agent productivity, estimate versus actual drift by cost category: these cut across modules, and cross module reporting is where configuration ceilings live. Meanwhile release cadence means your operational improvement queues behind everyone else's.

The four routes forward

Stay and specialise the edges. Keep the suite for finance and record keeping, and add focused tooling where you compete. This is the lowest risk route and the one most agencies and yards should take. Switch suites. Danaos, BASSnet, SpecTec, Dataloy and Veson Nautical all occupy adjacent ground with different strengths across chartering, operations, agency and technical management, and a switch is justified when the functional gap is structural. Expect a year and a finance migration.

Use a specialist service alongside. Disbursement account management is a case in point: services such as DA-Desk exist specifically to handle port cost validation and payment at scale, which changes what your own system needs to do. Deciding what to outsource is a real strategic choice, not a technical one. Or build the operational layer. Keep the ledger, build the port call workspace or the yard job costing system around it, and post to finance through an interface. This is the route with the best return for organisations whose operational execution is genuinely their product.

When building your own is the right call

Build when the workflow is your competitive advantage. An agency network that wins on transparency to principals should own the principal facing portal, the estimate to final account trail, and the reporting that proves accuracy call after call. That is not an IT expense, it is the thing clients renew for. A yard that competes on turnaround and honest variation handling should own the job costing and variation workflow, because the alternative is losing money quietly on every dock and blaming the market.

Build also when your structure defeats standard products: multiple entities with intercompany work, mixed agency and logistics services, or a yard doing both repair and conversion with very different cost structures. Do not build the general ledger, ever. Do not build if your operational process is genuinely standard, because you will spend six figures reproducing a product. And do not start without an internal owner who understands both the operation and the data, because maritime operational software fails on data ownership far more often than on code.

Migration when finance sits in the same system

The finance entanglement is what makes these projects heavy, so separate the two decisions deliberately. If you are building an operational layer, keep the ledger untouched, define exactly what posts across and when, and reconcile daily during the first two months. If you are replacing the whole suite, treat it as a finance migration with operations attached, not the reverse: cut over at a financial year end, migrate open items rather than full transaction history where your auditor permits it, and keep the outgoing system readable for statutory retention periods.

Export planning covers principals and suppliers with terms, tariff and port cost reference data, historical disbursement accounts or job records with their variations, contacts and vessel particulars, and every document attached to a call or a job. Port tariffs and yard rate cards deserve their own workstream, because they are frequently maintained by hand and are frequently wrong. Run parallel through a full month end close, then a second one, before you trust the numbers. Train by office rather than all at once, and give each office a nominated super user who has already worked in the new system for two weeks.

Cost bands

Maritime suites are usually quoted per user with modules and an implementation fee, and the implementation is where the real cost sits, particularly if you have several offices and entities. Ask for a fixed price on data migration, and expect resistance, which itself tells you something. On the custom side, from Digital Heroes delivery experience: a port call operations workspace with estimate to final account tracking, supplier cost capture, mobile boat notes and principal reporting runs roughly $60k to $140k over 10 to 16 weeks. A yard job costing and variation system with work packages, subcontractor tracking and dock capacity views runs roughly $70k to $160k. A full operational platform across several entities with finance integration runs $200k to $500k and should be phased office by office. Hosting is a modest monthly cost, and budget a retainer for tariff and regulatory updates.

The verdict

Single office agency with standard work and a working ledger: stay, and spend on the mobile capture and principal reporting edges rather than on a migration. Agency network competing on transparency: keep the ledger, build the port call and principal portal layer, and treat it as a commercial investment. Repair yard losing money on variations: build the job costing and variation workflow first, because that is a measurable leak and no suite will represent your trades and dock plan the way you need. Full suite replacement is justified when the functional gap is structural and named, when finance is willing to own a year end cutover, and when you have somebody internal who will still be there to run it in three years.