Every software demo starts the same way: a slick presentation promising a world of ‘efficiency,’ ‘transparency,’ and ‘control.’ You’ve heard it all before. But how do you separate the sales pitch from the shipyard reality? Choosing the wrong software isn’t just a mistake; it’s a multi-year sentence of costly workarounds and frustrated teams.
You need to cut through the marketing noise and diagnose the system’s true capabilities.
This checklist is your diagnostic tool. It’s a list of 10 pointed, industry-specific questions designed to expose the difference between a true shipbuilding platform and a generic tool with a fancy wrapper. Take these questions to your next vendor meeting, and their answers will tell you everything you need to know.
Question 1: How does your system manage the project’s physical hierarchy?
Why it matters: A ship is a complex 3D space, not a flat list of tasks. A system that doesn’t understand the physical relationships between areas, decks, and compartments can’t provide location-based insights or help you find bottlenecks.
- 🔴 Red Flag Answer: “You can use tags or custom fields to label tasks by zone.”
- This is a workaround, not a solution. It places the burden of maintaining spatial context on you and offers no built-in analytical capabilities.
- 🟢 Green Light Answer: “Our system is built on a native, hierarchical structure: Vessel -> Area -> Deck -> Compartment. This is core to our architecture, allowing you to filter, group, and analyze all project data in the context of the physical space right out of the box.”
Question 2: How do you measure progress beyond hours and task counts?
Why it matters: Measuring progress by “meters pulled” or “tasks completed” is dangerously misleading because it treats all work as equal. You need a metric that understands that a heavy power cable is not the same as a signal cable.
- 🔴 Red Flag Answer: “We track man-hours logged against tasks or the percentage of tasks completed.”
- This creates the “illusion of progress” and tells you nothing about the actual volume of work accomplished.
- 🟢 Green Light Answer: “We use an objective, calculated workload metric (we call it Cable Points) that is automatically derived from the physical properties of each item, like cross-section and core count. This allows you to measure what actually matters: consumed effort. It means your 50% progress mark represents 50% of the actual budget and schedule, not just 50% of the easy work.”
Question 3: How do you handle the nightmare of cable list revisions?
Why it matters: The cable list is a living document that changes constantly. Manually comparing two 10,000-line spreadsheets to find what’s changed is a high-risk, time-consuming nightmare.
- 🔴 Red Flag Answer: “You’ll need to maintain a version log and have your engineers carefully track any changes.”
- This is a recipe for human error and costly mistakes when outdated information is used.
- 🟢 Green Light Answer: “We have a built-in, AI-powered document comparison tool. You can upload two versions of your cable list, and the system will instantly generate a clear, actionable report showing every single addition, deletion, and modification.”
Question 4: How do you connect the field to the office in real time?
Why it matters: “Information lag”—the delay between work being done and managers knowing about it—is the primary cause of inefficiency. A system that relies on end-of-day reporting is already obsolete.
- 🔴 Red Flag Answer: “Supervisors can enter their team’s progress into the system when they get back to the office.”
- This is not real-time. It’s delayed, historical reporting that forces you to manage based on yesterday’s news.
- 🟢 Green Light Answer: “Through a simple mobile app and on-site QR codes. When an installer completes a task, a 10-second scan instantly updates the status for the entire project team, from the Site Manager’s tablet to the Project Director’s dashboard.”
Question 5: How does your system handle the import of our existing, imperfect data?
Why it matters: The biggest barrier to adopting new software is the fear of a painful data migration. Forcing your team to spend weeks manually reformatting spreadsheets to fit a rigid template is a non-starter.
- 🔴 Red Flag Answer: “We have a robust data import module. You’ll just need to have your team reformat your existing spreadsheets to match our standardized template. We provide full documentation for the required format.”
- This places the entire burden of onboarding on you and is a massive, hidden cost.
- 🟢 Green Light Answer: “Our AI-powered importer analyzes your existing file structure and automatically suggests how to map your columns to our system’s fields. You don’t adapt to our system; our system adapts to your data.”
Question 6: How does the system enforce the correct sequence of work?
Why it matters: Human error is inevitable. A system should act as a “digital watchman,” preventing critical mistakes like powering up equipment before all its prerequisite tasks are complete.
- 🔴 Red Flag Answer: “Managers are responsible for ensuring the correct procedures are followed.”
- This relies on manual oversight, which is fallible and cannot scale in a complex environment.
- 🟢 Green Light Answer: “We use automated system flags based on rules you define. For example, the system can physically prevent a user from changing an equipment’s status to ‘Ready for Testing’ until it automatically verifies that 100% of its associated cables have the status ‘Terminated’.”
Question 7: How do you manage access for multiple contractors on a single project?
Why it matters: In a multi-contractor environment, you need to provide access without exposing sensitive commercial or operational data to competitors. A simple “admin/user” model is dangerously inadequate.
- 🔴 Red Flag Answer: “We have an ‘admin’ role and a ‘user’ role.”
- This is a one-size-fits-all approach that fails to address the complexities of real-world projects.
- 🟢 Green Light Answer: “Our flexible, role-based access control (RBAC) system allows you to create unlimited custom roles. You can configure a role for ‘Contractor A’ that gives them access to only their assigned tasks, while completely hiding the work and financial data of ‘Contractor B’.”
Question 8: How does your system build supply chain resilience?
Why it matters: “Hard-coding” your project to specific manufacturer part numbers makes your schedule and budget a hostage to your suppliers. You need the flexibility to find alternatives quickly.
- 🔴 Red Flag Answer: “You can maintain a list of approved suppliers in the system.”
- This doesn’t solve the core problem. The project’s data is still inflexibly tied to a single part number.
- 🟢 Green Light Answer: “We architecturally decouple the technical ‘Specification’ from the commercial ‘Product Type’. This allows your procurement team to find and approve multiple products from different suppliers that all meet the same engineering requirement, giving you immense flexibility without forcing engineering changes. This empowers your procurement team to become a strategic asset, actively seeking market opportunities and mitigating risks, rather than just being order-takers for a fixed parts list. It builds true supply chain resilience.”
Question 9: How does the system leverage data from past projects to improve future ones?
Why it matters: Every completed project is a treasure trove of data. A good system should help you learn from that data to create more accurate bids and plans for the future.
- 🔴 Red-Flag Answer: “You can access and review reports from all your old projects.”
- This is passive data storage, not active intelligence.
- 🟢 Green-Light Answer: “The system aggregates historical performance data, such as your actual cost and time per Cable Point on different types of tasks. This historical data becomes the foundation for data-driven forecasting, allowing you to bid on new projects with much greater accuracy and confidence.”
Question 10: What is your product philosophy and development roadmap?
Why it matters: You are not just buying a tool; you are entering a long-term partnership. You need to know if the vendor is a true specialist committed to your industry or a generalist trying to be everything to everyone.
- 🔴 Red Flag Answer: “We are customer-driven and add features based on user requests.”
- While this sounds good, it often leads to a bloated, unfocused product that tries to please everyone and excels at nothing.
- 🟢 Green Light Answer: “We are industry experts building a specialized tool for other experts. Our roadmap is focused on deepening our capabilities in electrical project management, enhancing our analytical tools, and providing robust API integrations with other key systems like CAD, ERP and DMS”
Conclusion: Choose a Partner, Not Just a Product
Don’t let a slick presentation distract you from the hard questions. Choosing the right software is one of the most important strategic decisions you will make. Use this checklist to find a true partner—a vendor whose system is architected to solve the real-world challenges you face every single day.
The right questions lead to the right partner. Download this checklist as a PDF, and walk into your next software evaluation ready to find a solution truly forged for the shipyard.