Sea trials and commissioning: tracking every snag before delivery
It is 0900. There are eleven snags. By 1400 there will be thirty. Reconciling three parties' lists at the end of every trial day is where commissioning schedules lose days — and it is the problem yacht commissioning software should solve.
Sea trials start at 0600. By 0900, the engineering team has found a hydraulic leak at the stabiliser manifold, an HVAC unit on the main deck that cycles but does not reach temperature, and a navigation light that fails intermittently under load. The AV integrator has flagged two zones where the audio system drops signal. The interior team has four snags from the overnight transit: a door seal that vibrates at speed, a shower drain that empties slowly, a blind in the owner's cabin that jams at 60 percent, and a smear on the lacquer inside the main saloon entrance that was not visible in the yard.
It is 0900. There are eleven snags. By 1400 there will be thirty. The delivery manager is writing them into a shared spreadsheet. The captain is photographing them on his phone. The yard's commissioning engineer has his own list, in a different format, on a clipboard. By the time the vessel returns to the dock, the three lists need to be reconciled, duplicates removed, priorities agreed, and the combined list turned into a working brief for the yard's rectification team before trials resume in forty-eight hours.
This reconciliation process, repeated across every sea trial cycle, is where commissioning schedules lose days. It is the problem that yacht commissioning software should solve, and almost none of it does.
Why snag tracking during commissioning is a different problem
Snag tracking during sea trials is not the same problem as routine maintenance tracking or even warranty management. It has a specific set of pressures that standard tools are not shaped around.
The first is speed. Defects surface faster during sea trials than at any other point in a vessel's life. Systems tested individually in the yard are now running simultaneously under load, in real sea conditions, with all departments operating at once. The rate of new snags in the first forty-eight hours of trials can exceed anything the team will encounter in a normal working week. The logging process has to keep pace with discovery, which means it has to be fast and require minimal data entry per item.
The second is spatial density. Snags during commissioning are distributed across the entire vessel simultaneously. An engineering snag on the lower deck, an interior snag on the main deck, and an AV snag on the bridge deck may all be discovered within twenty minutes of each other by three different people in three different locations. Each needs to be logged in a way that places it precisely on the vessel without requiring the person logging it to stop, navigate to a laptop, and fill in a detailed form.
The third is the multi-party dynamic. Sea trials typically involve the vessel's permanent crew, the shipyard's commissioning team, the owner's rep or delivery manager, and multiple subcontractors: AV integrators, naval architects, class surveyors, and specialist systems engineers. Each party is logging snags from their own area of responsibility. The challenge is not getting each party to log items. It is getting all of those items into a single record, with a consistent format, without duplication and without items falling between parties.
The fourth is the delivery deadline. Sea trials do not have a flexible end date. The vessel is contracted for delivery on a specific date. Every day of rectification work is measured against that date. The team managing snags is making real-time decisions about which items block delivery and which can be carried into the warranty period — and those decisions need to be made from an accurate, complete, and current picture of what is open.
How Map My Maintenance handles commissioning snag tracking
The preparation starts before sea trials begin. The vessel's GA plan is uploaded in Area Setup. Each deck is created as a named level. Within each deck, every significant space is drawn: engine room, stabiliser bay, crew mess, main saloon, owner's cabin, bridge, bow thruster room, each exterior zone. Location markers are placed within each space for the specific systems where snags are most likely to surface. This setup, completed in the yard before trials begin, means that every snag logged during sea trials is pinned to a precise location on the vessel from the moment it is created. It takes minutes per deck to configure.
Once at sea, the Project List handles the rapid logging that commissioning pace requires. Each snag is logged with a title, a brief overview, a priority, and a location. On the mobile app, location selection is a three-tap process: select the deck, select the space, select the location marker. The item is created, pinned, and in the shared record within sixty seconds of the snag being identified. The engineer at the stabiliser manifold does not need to return to the navigation station to log the hydraulic fault. They log it where they found it.
There is no reconciliation process at the end of the day because the three lists were never separate.
Priority carries immediate operational meaning. Urgent flags items that affect the vessel's ability to continue trials or present a safety concern. High covers items that affect the delivery condition — items the owner or class surveyor will inspect before acceptance. Medium and Low cover items that can be carried to warranty without affecting delivery. Filter to Urgent and High and the list shows exactly what needs to be resolved before the vessel leaves the yard.
Multiple parties log simultaneously. The yard's commissioning engineer, the AV integrator, and the captain are all operating as assigned users on the same site. Each logs items from their own area of responsibility as they find them. Every item lands in the same Project List, in the same format, pinned to the same GA plan. The shared record builds throughout the day.
Photos become work instructions
When an engineer photographs a hydraulic leak, the image is uploaded directly to the item and the Annotation Tool opens. They draw on the exact failure point, add a Section describing what was observed, and note the conditions when it appeared. That annotated image appears in the printed report — the yard's rectification team receives it before they begin the repair, not after a verbal briefing.
The Sections feature handles the case where a single location has multiple distinct snags. A main saloon entrance lacquer smear and a secondary threshold seal issue are the same space but two different items of rectification work. Both can be documented as separate Sections within the same Project List item, each with its own annotation, description, and method.
For the multi-party reporting that delivery requires, the reporting function generates Full Reports, Summary Reports, or Single Item Reports from any filtered view. The delivery manager filters to all Urgent and High items unresolved at the end of each trial day, generates a PDF, and sends it from the application to the yard's commissioning manager and the owner's rep simultaneously. It is the daily close-out brief, produced in under five minutes.
The Timeline and Follow-Up Gantt view plots every open snag against its proposed rectification dates. The delivery manager can see which items are scheduled for which day, whether the schedule has enough capacity before the delivery date, and which items have no proposed end date and therefore no scheduled resolution. Items drifting toward the delivery date without a plan are visible before they become a problem. Reminders attach to any item and surface on the Dashboard on the day they fall due, so a snag logged as Paused pending a specialist contractor resurfaces on its follow-up date.
What two days of sea trials looks like managed this way
Day one underway. By 1400, the shared Project List holds thirty-one items across engineering, interior, AV, and deck. Every item is pinned to its location on the GA. Six are Urgent, fourteen are High, eleven are Medium. The delivery manager filters to Urgent and High and generates the daily PDF report, sent to the yard's commissioning manager, the owner's rep, and the class surveyor from the application. The yard's rectification team begins work on the six Urgent items that afternoon while the vessel is still at sea.
Day one evening. The vessel is back at the dock. The yard's engineers work through the night on the Urgent items. Each completion is logged on the mobile app with a status change and photos of the rectified work. The Activity Log records every change with a timestamp.
Day two pre-departure. Five of the six Urgent items are marked complete. One remains Progressing: the HVAC unit requires a refrigerant recharge that cannot be completed until the specialist contractor arrives at 0800. The Reminder set on that item surfaces automatically. The delivery manager confirms the arrival time and adds a comment to the Activity Log. Departure is delayed one hour; the HVAC item is completed and marked done before the vessel leaves the dock.
Day two underway. Eleven new snags are added. Three of the High items from day one are marked complete by the yard's commissioning engineer working from the printed report. The Project List closes the second day with twenty-nine open items, six of which are Urgent. The delivery decision is made from the filtered list: four of the six Urgent items have rectification scheduled before the delivery date. Two are carried to warranty with the owner's rep's agreement, documented in a comment on each item's Activity Log.
Delivery day. The captain generates a Full Report of all completed items as PDF — the commissioning record. A Summary Report of the eight items carried to warranty is sent to the owner's rep as the warranty opening record. Both documents were built across the trials process. Neither required any additional work to produce.
The point most commissioning teams reach too late
The instinct during sea trials is to focus entirely on finding and fixing snags, and to treat documentation as secondary work to be caught up on when the pace eases. The pace rarely eases. By the time the vessel is at delivery, the documentation is behind, the three parties' lists have partially merged and partially diverged, and producing a clean delivery record requires a dedicated effort that was not planned for.
The counterintuitive point is this: the time invested in setting up a spatially organised snag tracking system before trials begin is returned many times over during the trials themselves. Not because the logging is faster, though it is. Because the reconciliation cost at the end of each day is removed entirely. Because the rectification brief for the yard is produced from the live list. Because the delivery record and the warranty opening record are generated from the same data that was being maintained throughout, not compiled from scratch under deadline pressure.