Any small or medium sized business may have an HR lead or at least the right tools to manage all of the admin that comes with hiring and managing their team, but if we take this concept onto a superyacht, where there may be 10 or 20 employees (crew) on board, it’s not always as joined up.

Deep Blue Software has recently upgraded its Crew Management Package to bring all of these key HR functions together in a connected and seamless structure, so the captain, manager or whoever is running the HR function has one single record for each crew member. It often surprises me that yacht admin for the crew is often referred to as disjointed or very basic, as this is one of the largest operating costs on board; however, it seems that many of the software developers are now trying to professionalise the way in which contracts, crew management and planning and the actual payroll is all connected. 

“The difference here is that crewing isn't a world of its own. It starts from the same crew records the rest of the platform already use, and it ends up in the accounts. That’s what stops people rebuilding the same information in three places.”

Essentially, the Deep Blue rebuild/upgrade adds a more intelligent functionality to the process of managing the people who work on board, combined with how they are paid and how this significant monthly cost is recorded by the accounts team ashore. Captains, pursers and management companies can now record a contract change, a rotation or a period of leave once and see it carried through to the payslip without entering it anywhere a second time.

“We didn’t want to stop at connecting the modules within crewing,” says Diego Zanco, COO at DeepBlue. “The difference here is that crewing isn't a world of its own. It starts from the same crew records the rest of the platform already use, and it ends up in the accounts. That’s what stops people rebuilding the same information in three places.”

What is interesting, is the fact that the HR and payroll function starts to become joined up from yacht to shore, but perhaps more important is that from the day a crew member joins a yacht and is issued their first contract, they can feel like an employee with clear reporting, recording and transparency, where changes discussed on board can be immediately connected and recorded with those who are paying their salary. In essence, this is the right approach for the industry to start seeing how yachts can actually run like a small business with HR processes and systems that give clarity and professionalism, in one connected eco-system.

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