Difficult To Find Replacements Parts for My Boat
Jared 00:07
Why is it so difficult for me to find replacement boat parts for my boat?
Matt 00:11
That's a good one.
Jared 00:12
We're kind of opening up Pandora's Box here.
Matt 00:14
Yeah, that is Pandora's Box. Well, the biggest thing is that the marine industry isn't held to the same standards as like the auto industry. You know, car manufacturers are required to keep replacement parts for X many years after a car is no longer in production, the Marine insure you can have parts change on the fly in the same production year, and there's no documentation. Now, some builders do a really good job of documentation, but it's not required. Sure, that's the biggest?
Andrew 00:39
Yeah, well, it’s a function of scale. Right, you know, you look a little bit at, you know, how expensive it is to really keep a detailed bill of materials of, you know, a decent sized boat, and you go, that's pretty close to a full time, you know, your job for someone or jobs, jobs, multiple jobs, you know and when you're building, you know, hundreds of 1000s or millions of a model of a vehicle, then that's a drop in the bucket and obviously, that's just baseline, right. But when you're building, you know, eight of these boats a year, you know, that might not be practical, and some of them are custom in every single way. Totally, some of our customers are single white. And, you know, it turns into, you know, you want to know what we use that year, go out and ask, you know, Bob in the shop, or I think Bob knows what we would have been using…
Matt 01:26
Oh, this guy down in Islamorada uses that boat that year, call him and see what he says.
Andrew 01:31
It’s really difficult. And I think it is something that most boat owners don't realize what they're getting into when they buy their first boat, you know, experienced boat owners get it, it's just, it's par for the course. And it's a pain in the butt. But I think it's surprising for new boat owners. You know, it's, it's tricky, because we have a unique perspective, and that we are an OEM supplier to the boat builders, we build 1000s of parts that are unique to these different builders. And you know, when we prototype a new part, we know of course, what year it is, and we know what model we're designing that for, generally speak well, yeah, because let's assume that we get right. And I'd say more times than not, we do. Yeah, the tricky thing is, though, you know, it's not uncommon at all year to have that part for them; they continue to purchase that part. And they decide they're putting it on your model XYZ, right was originally designed for this model. And yeah, that part might be purchased from us, say, for the next five to 10 years.
Jared 02:29
And we just see the sales volume go up; we are just selling a lot more of that boat.
Andrew 02:32
And we don't even realize that three years down the road, the side console door, this was originally designed for this model, and it's not even being used on that modeling or that model went out of production. Now it's used on that model boat, and you have that across every OEM supplier of the marine industry and you know, the people that sell latches to you know Sea Hunt, they have no idea where that is gonna go, it’s the same matches.
Matt 02:56
They just know they sold some lashes. Right
Jared 02:59
Yeah, my hope is that, you know, I definitely have seen just in the time that I've been here, you know, how far the Kyle has come with, you know, being able to document things. And, you know, technology is a huge aspect of that. And I leaned to you, Matt, are you seeing the same thing kind of from the OEMs, I kind of get that feeling you work with customers more so than I but…
Matt 03:16
You know, there's, there's definitely been an improvement in the marine industry for documentation, you know, so I can think of some builders that do a really good job like see right off the top of my head for a long time, it's done a great job of documenting everything that's going into the individual models, but they're again, a little bit of a function of scale, though.
Andrew 03:30
It is for sure for builders, build manage, and bigger builders is advantageous for smaller, it might get more customization.
Matt 03:38
But I could go back and look at like files from the late 80s that they have part numbers in call outs for all that stuff and see Ray did a really good job of that. And then I can think of other boat builders where I mean, parts have changed in the same production year with no documentation running engineering changes for sure. Yeah, and, you know, those are those are a challenge, but that's the main reason why it's hard to find replacement parts for a botnet. Now you throw in the fact that a boat builder builds a boat, an engine manufacturer, builds an engine and rigging and controls and sells those to the boat builder. So you have it you might have a dealer that sells Sea Hunt, and they're also a Yamaha dealer. You're not going to go to Sea Hunt, when you need a Yamaha gauge, right? You're going to go to the Yamaha dealer in order to get that but a lot of boat builders don't realize that those two things are two separate entities. Right so they might start calling Sea Hunt, oh, well, we only sell boats. We don't we're not an engine dealer here. Okay, we need to find a Yamaha dealer or you know, it could be Mercury could be anybody else. But that's the other challenge that new boat owners face when they're searching for parts.
Jared 04:49
Yeah, so definitely a big challenge. Good news is we got a team of people help people right.
Andrew 04:54
It's tricky and one of the things that we do which you're right or wrong, we try to do what we think is Fast is, you know, we, for example might have, you know, 1000 parts we built for a boat builder and your customer might reach out to us looking for a replacement frame for a side console door or whatever it is right? And you will be able to look at it often and recognize that it is a part that we built, right? You know, but then you're finding that exact part in our library of the console doors we've built just for that boat builder can often be very tricky and you know, the model year is not the end all be all. So what we'll often do is we will do as much homework as we can and potentially send that customer maybe two or three drawings right and ask them to go out and measure because you mentioned even running engineering changes are a bear right?
Matt 05:46
And that's a challenge even within our walls here running engineering changes which we do a decent job of documenting but now you have to figure out when was that change made? What years the boat? Did that change apply to that boat or maybe was that builder using old stock?
Andrew 06:02
Right because even when we make an engineering change for someone we don't know how much inventory they have to use an existing model right? So it's you know, it's like hey, the best way is let us help narrow it down for you. Let us send you some drawings, let you compare and go oh, do I have the hinge with three mounting holes on each side or do I have the hinge with two mounting holes on each side because this hinge was discontinued in the middle of 2017 and on this Everglades live well lid you know and…
Matt 06:25
And that settles in the detail with all that stuff, right? Either works or doesn't right? Well, we can see drawing but you weren't. We're relying on our customer to do their due diligence and make sure that yeah, I'm looking at this the hinges match the dimensions match the shape matches, all of the hardware matches. Like you said, a two-hole hinge versus a three-hole hinge can be the make or break on whether a part works or not when the customer gets it totally.
Andrew 06:49
Yeah, it's definitely a challenge for sure.