Your planned-maintenance system was state of the art when it shipped — twenty years ago. Your crews tolerate it, your superintendents work around it, and nobody can see across the fleet without a week of exports. ZipMarine was built this decade, with AI at the core, and it starts with one pilot vessel — not a fleet-wide leap of faith.
Every fleet technical department lives with the same three facts. None of them are controversial — they just never get fixed, because replacing a planned-maintenance system fleet-wide has always looked like open-heart surgery.
Built before smartphones, patched ever since. Data entry is punishment, search barely works, and the interface trains crews to do the minimum the auditor will accept — which defeats the entire point of planned maintenance.
When logging a job takes longer than doing it, engineers log less. Histories thin out, spares counts drift from reality, and the office makes decisions on records everyone aboard knows are stale.
Each ship’s records live on each ship. Comparing maintenance spend across sister vessels, finding which hull has the spare you need, prepping a fleet-wide audit — all of it means emails, exports, and waiting.
Each vessel runs its own complete record. The fleet view reads across all of them, live. And underneath sits an AI that has ingested every manual, drawing, and service history on every ship — so questions that used to take a superintendent a morning of phone calls take seconds.
Maintenance status, spares, crew certifications, and spend — rolled up across every hull, drillable down to a single work order. Compare sister vessels honestly, because the data finally comes from one place.
Every manual on every ship, every machinery history, every parts list. Ask “which vessels carry this pump, and which one had the seal failure?” and get the answer in seconds — with the source documents attached.
Port state control (the foreign-port spot check), class society surveys, internal ISM audits — the records they ask for are already organized and current. Audit prep becomes a review, not a week of reconstruction.
On a cruise ship, the galley chillers and the main engines are usually two software worlds. Here they’re one — same work orders, same spares logic, same rollup — so the hotel side stops being a maintenance blind spot.
Fleet software earns trust by how it’s structured, not by what its brochure promises. Here is the structure, in plain terms.
Each vessel’s records are a sealed unit. The fleet view reads across them; nothing leaks between them, and nothing of yours is ever visible to another customer.
Access is layered: fleet, vessel, department. A third engineer sees their work orders. A superintendent sees their ships. The office sees spend. Nobody sees more than their job requires.
Every record is exportable, in standard formats, whenever you want it. If we ever part ways, your histories leave with you intact. We compete on the product, not on lock-in.
One ship goes first. It runs in parallel with your current system until you say otherwise. The fleet follows on your schedule — there is no all-or-nothing cutover, ever.
The incumbent systems can’t become AI-native — they can only bolt a chat window onto a twenty-year-old database and call it a feature. We started after the AI shift, so the intelligence isn’t an add-on; it’s the foundation everything else stands on. That’s not a thing you can retrofit, and your vendors know it.
Being new also means we don’t ask for blind trust. Pilot one vessel. Put us on your hardest ship, next to your current system, and measure us — data quality, crew adoption, time saved on audit prep. If the pilot doesn’t earn the fleet, the conversation ends there, and you’ve lost one vessel’s worth of effort, not a fleet migration.
What we ask in return is a real pilot: a named vessel, engaged crew, and a superintendent who’ll tell us bluntly what’s wrong. That feedback is worth more to us than the contract.
No fleet-wide commitment up front, no self-serve checkout, no pricing page surprise. Fleet agreements are scoped to your fleet in a conversation, because forty hulls is not a credit-card decision.
We pick a ship together — ideally a difficult one. We ingest her manuals, machinery list, and existing records, stand the crew up in days, and run alongside your current system. Scope, timeline, and success criteria are written down before we start.
You define the yardsticks; common ones are crew logging rates, record completeness, audit-prep hours, and time-to-answer for technical questions. At the end of the pilot you have numbers, not impressions.
If the numbers earn it, the fleet follows — vessel by vessel, in the order and at the pace your operation can absorb. Each ship goes live the same proven way the pilot did.
Honestly: partially today, more on a published roadmap. We import from the common legacy maintenance systems and spreadsheets now, and an API for procurement and crewing integrations is in active development. During pilot scoping we map your exact systems and tell you plainly what connects now, what’s roadmapped with dates, and what isn’t — before you commit anything.
Because it asks less of them. Logging a job takes seconds on a phone, the AI fills in part numbers and history instead of demanding them, and crews get something back — instant answers from their own ship’s manuals — instead of just feeding the office. Adoption is a pilot success metric we measure, not a promise we make.
We expect one and we’re set up for it. You get our security documentation up front — architecture, data isolation model, access controls, hosting, and data-handling practices — and our technical team works directly with your IT and security people through their questionnaire. Per-vessel isolation and exportable data are structural, so the review tends to be about verifying, not negotiating.
A pilot is one vessel, a written scope, agreed success metrics, and a fixed timeline — typically one season or a defined number of months, with check-ins along the way. Pricing for the pilot and the fleet is scoped in the first conversation based on vessel count and complexity; there’s no public rate card for fleets because no two fleets are shaped alike. You’ll have numbers in writing before anything starts.
An hour with your technical leadership: your fleet, your current systems, your worst audit story. We’ll show you the screen and propose a pilot vessel. No deck of slides, no checkout page.