Your Mobile shipyard ERP knows the dry-dock booking but not the change order, the labor hours, or the CBP entry
A custom ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) for a Mobile operation typically runs $110k to $190k and 6 to 9 months to reach production. You go custom when your real workflow (a vessel in dry dock generating change orders, labor hours, material draws, and a customs entry all at once) does not fit the rows-and-columns model of NetSuite or Odoo. For a port-and-maritime business in Mobile, the ERP has to hold a job that spans water, yard, and CBP paperwork simultaneously, and most off-the-shelf suites treat those as separate worlds.
You bought NetSuite or SAP to get one source of truth, and instead your dry-dock superintendent still keeps the real schedule in a spreadsheet because the ERP has no concept of a vessel occupying a graving dock for 40 days while three trades work overlapping shifts. The aerospace supplier feeding the Airbus line at Brookley has the same gap from the other side: the ERP tracks purchase orders fine but cannot tie an AOG part back to the specific tail number and the customs entry that cleared it.
Off-the-shelf ERP assumes a factory that makes the same widget over and over. Mobile's yards and port-logistics firms run project-based, one-off work where every hull, every dry-dock period, and every transload is its own little business with its own margin. When the tool cannot model that, finance closes the month by exporting to Excel and stapling the truth back together by hand.
The case for owning your erp
A custom ERP lets you make the job the center of the system instead of the invoice. For a Mobile shipyard, that means a graving-dock schedule, labor hours by trade, material issues, change orders, and the customs paperwork all hang off one job number, and finance sees margin move in real time instead of at month-end. You are not buying generic manufacturing software and forcing your hull into it; you are encoding how a Gulf Coast repair yard actually books and bills work.
What your build should include
Mobile ERP: the full scope
Digital Heroes builds the full ERP stack for Mobile teams. Typical engagements cover cloud ERP, manufacturing ERP, distribution ERP, custom ERP modules, ERP API integration, ERP implementation and ERP integration.
Budgeting a erp build in Mobile
| Project scope | Typical cost | Timeline |
|---|---|---|
| Job-centric ERP for a single yard or terminal | $110k to $160k | 6 to 8 months |
| Multi-entity ERP (yard + terminal + trucking) with customs layer | $170k to $250k | 8 to 11 months |
| Integration + project layer over existing NetSuite or Dynamics | $55k to $95k | 3 to 5 months |
Delivery, week by week
Exactly what you get
A working ERP where the job, not the invoice, is the center of gravity. A graving-dock schedule that knows a vessel is in for 40 days, labor captured by trade and shift, material issues drawn against the job, change orders that move revenue the day they are approved, and customs entries that post themselves to the ledger. Finance stops rebuilding the month in Excel. Superintendents stop keeping a shadow schedule. You get one number for where each job stands on margin, available the day the work happens rather than three weeks after close.
How to choose a developer in Mobile
Hire a team that has built project-based ERP, not just retail or SaaS billing systems. Ask them to walk a single ship-repair job from dry-dock booking to final invoice and show where change orders, retainage, and the customs entry live in their model. Push hard on the customs and ACE integration: a firm that has never touched CBP data will underestimate it badly. Local presence helps for the yard-floor discovery and the hurricane-season support reality, but the real test is whether they understand that a Mobile shipyard runs one-off contract work, not a product line, and whether they can interoperate with your existing inventory-management-software, warehouse-management-system, and accounting-software rather than demanding you replace everything at once.
- One job number ties the dry-dock booking, trade labor, material draws, change orders, and the CBP entry so margin is visible mid-job, not at close
- Customs and ACE data flow into the GL automatically, killing the broker-software-to-Excel reconciliation that eats your month-end
- Project accounting matches how repair and new-construction work is actually estimated and billed, including progress billing and retainage
- Integrates with your warehouse-management-system and inventory-management-software so the yard's steel and consumables are one stock picture
- Reporting built for Navy and aerospace contract work, so DCAA or prime-contractor audits do not require a three-week scramble
- A real ERP rebuild is the most expensive and longest project on this list; budget 6 to 9 months before it carries daily operations
- You take on ownership of the customs and tax logic that SAP would have maintained for you, which means a real plan for regulatory updates
- Change management is brutal: superintendents who trust their spreadsheets will resist a new system until it is provably faster than what they have
- If your transaction volume is low and your jobs are simple, a configured NetSuite plus integrations may genuinely beat a custom build on total cost
- !They quote a fixed price before seeing how your dry-dock and customs workflows actually run; ask them to walk one job end to end first
- !No experience with project/job costing; ask for a past build that handled progress billing and retainage
- !They wave off customs and ACE integration as 'just an export'; ask exactly how entries will post to the GL
- !They cannot explain a data-migration plan off your legacy terminal software; ask what happens to ten years of job history
- !No offline or storm-contingency story for a Gulf Coast yard; ask what the system does when a hurricane takes connectivity down
Most Mobile teams pricing erp end up comparing notes on internal tools, shopify, inventory management too; the systems share one data spine.
Rohan advises mid-market and enterprise teams on ERP, CRM and custom software, and has led delivery on dozens of business-software builds.
Writes for Digital Heroes, shipping business software for 2,000+ brands across 55+ countries since 2017.
Frequently asked questions
How much does custom ERP development cost for a Mobile shipbuilder or port logistics firm?
Plan on $110k to $190k for a single-entity, job-aware ERP, reaching production in 6 to 9 months. Multi-entity operations running a yard, terminal, and trucking together, with a full customs layer, run $170k to $250k. If your accounting core (NetSuite, Dynamics) is fine and you only need the project and customs logic, an integration layer lands at $55k to $95k.
Why can't NetSuite or SAP handle our dry-dock and customs workflow?
They can hold purchase orders and invoices, but they model a factory making repeatable products, not a vessel occupying a graving dock for weeks while overlapping trades rack up labor and change orders. And their native trade-compliance handling rarely reconciles ACE entries and bonded-warehouse movements back to the GL. That gap is why your superintendent keeps a spreadsheet and finance closes the month in Excel.
Can a custom ERP integrate with our existing customs broker software?
Yes, and it should. The goal is not to replace your broker but to ingest ACE entry data and bonded-warehouse movements automatically and post them to the ledger against the right job. That single integration usually kills the most painful manual reconciliation in a Mobile port-logistics back office.