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Monthly Insights and Innovations from the leading SuperYacht technology advisers and designers.
Hello, and another very warm welcome to our Smartcast episode eight. This episode's going to be another one of our themed tech talks where I'm going to be talking to Chris Beedy, one of Smart's invaluable and vastly experienced technology consultants. And on this tech talk, we're going to cover technology surveys. What are they, and why are they valuable? Thanks for tuning in.
Announcer:Welcome to SMARTcast. Monthly insights and innovations from the leading independent super yacht technology advisors and designers.
Howard Young:Thanks for coming down, Chris, on this soaking wet Yorkshire day. It's absolutely miserable, isn't it?
Chris Beedie:Yeah, it is.
Howard Young:So we're best tucked away in here talking about surveys. So we'll start off with what are they and why do they matter so much? So if you could just take us over what is a technology survey.
Chris Beedie:Yeah, a survey is an assessment, a review of a type of system, so AV, IT, security, communications. It reviews what's needed to either upgrade, refit, change, depends on the client's requirements and requests brought forward.
Howard Young:Is it looking for is this a sort of budget thing so that they're looking at the money they're going to put into it? Or can it sometimes be a legal thing for insurance and everything else?
Chris Beedie:It can be many things to be honest. So it can be if the client is actually wanting to sell and they might want to see what's wrong with the system prior to sale, or a buyer who
Howard Young:So like a house valuation, exactly.
Chris Beedie:Yeah, like a buying survey. It could be to do with a particular system. So if they want a wi fi upgrade, they're having problems with the network, or they want a new AV distribution, it could be an upgrade on that. Or actually a full refit, if the boat has a five year refit or a ten year refit, they might just want to upgrade everything and it could be just more of a preventive maintenance upgrade.
Howard Young:Have you got any examples of surveys that we've worked on at SMART recently that have been particularly interesting?
Chris Beedie:Yeah we've done a pre sale survey where we've actually overseen the whole AVIT security communication package that was on board and documented everything, what is there, what is an issue, current issue, basically the current status of the vessel.
Howard Young:So sometimes you probably uncover problems that are underlying and one not
Chris Beedie:100% you know documentation is good one, is in the fact that the documentation hasn't been updated for the last five years, so it's not actually accurate to the Pacific boat and the infrastructure that's on board.
Howard Young:What do you mean documentation?
Chris Beedie:Sorry. Drawings, the E M manuals to the actual maintenance of the vessel. So even down to document of IP addresses and things like that on hardware that's on board might actually be not there anymore.
Howard Young:So when you do something like this, it can literally run a comb through the well-being of the whole vessel, really. You're finding underlying problems, you literally can get things back on track, everything
Chris Beedie:and then look at
Howard Young:how things can be upgraded and improved.
Chris Beedie:Yeah, exactly. Again, for a pre sale or even the buyer side is what he's going to get and is it all working? Is it 100% there? If not, then obviously what needs to be achieved. So then we can put again on top of that a brief on what may need to be done to get it to a working standard.
Howard Young:And we do quite a lot of these surveys, don't we?
Chris Beedie:Yeah, we do obviously.
Howard Young:Yeah, land
Chris Beedie:not just the sale and buyer service, we do obviously system specific ones. WiFi service is a good one when people are wanting to upgrade their network, upgrade their Wi Fi. They might have dark spots already where they may need to improve. Going to new Wi Fi 6E or seven even, you know, they might need more access points than what they've got already. So we do a full wifi surveys and with a coverage map of what they're achieving already and then we can propose what they need to do to get it to a standard that they want.
Howard Young:So if you were to list on your fingers then what system specific are the common ones then, wifi would be one of them.
Chris Beedie:Yeah, well network, so IT network.
Howard Young:So that would be going through to Starlink and all, everything else?
Chris Beedie:Yes, communications, yes, definitely on the Starlink side, that flat panel technology is definitely coming around very fast. So everyone wants the latest flat panel technology on board. And then obviously upgrading the network, faster backbones for HD over IP solutions, which are now very bandwidth heavy on networks, so they need better uplinks.
Howard Young:So you can find massive improvements through a survey and then also give an idea of budgets and things.
Chris Beedie:Well, it's also finding what infrastructure's there already, if it's accurate to the drawings that they're providing, is hardly the case.
Howard Young:Or why it might not be performing as it should be.
Chris Beedie:Oh and yeah, sometimes the system hasn't been commissioned correctly at the beginning. So we can go on there and actually say, actually you don't need to change much, it's just commissioning that needs to be done. Which is a benefit of ourselves, because we're not there to sell products, we're there do the actual what the client requires.
Howard Young:I'm glad you said that because my next line on here is about SMART's approach to our framework towards these surveys. Could you take us just through the basic steps of that and how we differentiate ourselves?
Chris Beedie:We're there to supply technology advice. We're not there to sell products. We're not tied into any manufacturers or anything like that. So we're very independent.
Howard Young:Transparency all the way. 100%. It's not just what we might wanna sell because we're not selling anything, it's what we truly are gonna give
Chris Beedie:Yeah, what they're there to basically look at the client's requirements, what he likes, what he doesn't like about the system already. We then design systems to ensure it's gonna bring what he needs. Yeah. Opposed to just developing a big project to create bigger margins. We're not there to do that.
Chris Beedie:We're there, we don't sell anything, we sell advice. And I think the key is that the advice that we sell, we probably then save him in the oversell of hardware and requirements that other integrators do deal with.
Howard Young:So moving on then, what do you think the misconceptions and common mistakes are around these surveys?
Chris Beedie:I think the assumption of documentation being accurate can be a key one. People just send packages to integrators and say just design me a new system just based on drawing packages, which again, like I touched before, they could be five, ten years out of the day, things might have changed ad hoc throughout that process. Another one is designing systems to actually fit in a time period, a refit yard time itself. Integrators are there, they upsell, they try and create the biggest project they can within a set timeframe, but those timeframes are very tight. And when the boat leaves, it leaves to go on a charter or it leaves to go on a, you know, an owner's trip.
Chris Beedie:And so they need to be hit and that, you know, that's where they tend to, can tend to fail. Yeah. And also, you know, the difficulties of, actually integrating certain things, deck heads might need to be cut, so that's third party people need to be involved. They need to pull new cable in, they need to get custom paint job, maybe on speaker covers and things like that which all take time. And refit periods tend to be quite short.
Chris Beedie:Well again depending on the actual level of the refit itself can be four weeks to some can be three months, usually over a Christmas period or out of season period.
Howard Young:So it's like streamlining the efficiency of the whole refit and also preempting potential problems or holdups.
Chris Beedie:Yeah, like I say, we take all risks into the account of our timeframes that we design systems to. Again, we're there to create a system the client will enjoy, not something that's going to be commissioned during his first trip, because it's that tight in time frame.
Howard Young:So you listen to the owner what the girls are and the constraints and things and then investigate everything into that.
Chris Beedie:Exactly. Our main thing is listening to the client of what he wants to achieve, what he currently doesn't like about the system that he's trying to change and go from there.
Howard Young:Tell us a bit about the physical trace and not just going from drawings and things like that.
Chris Beedie:Well when we do our survey we literally will go through the current drawing package and check that it is accurate to what is on board. We'll go down to the level of the actual current hardware, what firmware's on the hardware, how it's commissioned and the actual.
Howard Young:So that's hands on system check.
Chris Beedie:Yeah, a full system check to how it's performing and to how it's installed. The cables could be a complete rat's nest as we've seen in many cases. But the AVIT officer might have just had the busiest charter season and had to get things working. So he's just thrown things in. Yeah.
Chris Beedie:But that's not on drawings.
Howard Young:So the contemporary fix is all over the place. No.
Chris Beedie:Could be on a fact packet drawing somewhere in, you know, the bottom of his cupboard, but you know, that's where, you know, it's important to go on board, see the status of the current system and then you know you can work from that.
Howard Young:To recommend the solutions Exactly. Forward, right. So it's all detail detail detail isn't it? And finding out the true problems and then streamlining everything to make it the most painless refit possible. So for a takeaway message then, what would you say a good survey represents?
Chris Beedie:Well I think the key is if a survey is not done, you could run into problems quite easily. A good survey would give you a good oversight of what you want, the client's requirements, a full detailed specification of those requirements for what needs to be achieved to a set timeline. If this isn't present then things could easily be oversold and over delivered in a timeframe that's not achievable. So that's why I think, like you say, the devil is in the detail and we have detailed surveys that we hand out.
Howard Young:So it's planning the smartest way forward?
Chris Beedie:Exactly.
Howard Young:With transparency for exactly what the owner needs for the end product.
Chris Beedie:So without one you're pretty much guessing, with one you've got a plan moving forward to your refits for your client.
Howard Young:Thanks so much for coming today Chris, that's amazing. And if you are listening, you're interested in a survey and you need some help, please get in touch with us. We're we're here ready to, make things move forward in the best way possible for you. Thanks for listening.
Chris Beedie:Thank you.
Announcer:Contact us at smart advisers dot com.