Stage 1 — Is the design actually tender-ready?
Before any yard is approached, one question decides everything that follows: does the owner hold a design package a yard can price without guessing? A general arrangement and a wish list are not a tender package. If the design is not ready, quotations come back with padding, assumptions and exclusions — and every one of those becomes a variation order later, at the yard's price rather than yours.
Where the design is not tender-ready, we either close that gap first with design consultancy, or we say so plainly and delay the tender. Sending an incomplete package to the market costs more than the delay does.
Stage 2 — The owner's profile, not just the vessel's
Two owners ordering the same 30-metre vessel often need two different yards. So before shortlisting, we define the project against three axes that always compete with each other:
- Cost — the budget that actually exists, not the aspiration
- Quality — the standard the vessel must meet in service, and for which class
- Delivery time — including what a late delivery really costs the owner
Alongside these we assess how the owner works: how much supervision they want to run themselves, how they handle change, how they prefer to communicate with a yard. A yard that suits a hands-on owner can be the wrong yard for one who needs a turnkey outcome.
Stage 3 — Three tiers, then a comparative tender
We shortlist yards in three classes rather than chasing a single "best" name:
- A class — premium quality at premium price. Chosen when the specification, class notation or end client leaves no room for compromise.
- B class — balanced cost, quality and delivery. The tier most commercial projects land in.
- C class — cost-focused. Viable for simpler hulls and owners who bring their own supervision.
Quotations are then compared on a like-for-like basis. This is where most of the value sits: a lower headline price with a thinner scope is not a cheaper vessel, and comparing bid totals without normalising the scope is the most expensive mistake an owner can make at this stage.
Stage 4 — Contract and financial structuring
Once a yard is selected, technical and commercial negotiations run together. Payment milestones, guarantees, the specification's status inside the contract, change-order mechanics and the delivery regime all get settled before signature — not discovered during construction.
Stage 5 — Site supervision, in a constructive posture
During construction we monitor the project on the owner's behalf, including the designer's deliverables, within the commercial, technical and time boundaries the owner has set. The working principle is early warning rather than after-the-fact claims: where we see an error forming, the yard hears about it before the steel is cut, not after.
That posture is deliberate. A supervision team that only collects evidence for a future dispute gets a defensive yard and a slower ship. A team that prevents the error protects the owner's budget and the yard's margin at the same time — and both parties leave the project willing to work together again.
Where we stand in the middle
After contract signature our role is that of an independent trustee party: we act to make the agreed contract happen as written, rather than to advance one side against the other. The owner gets an engineer on their side of the table; the yard gets a counterpart who understands what it is being asked to build.
