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In plain terms: Decades of 2D drawings, dead CAD files, and survey records describe a ship that no longer exists. Nothing keeps any of it in sync with the steel. So every repair job starts blind, and the real scope of the work is discovered only after the hull is opened.

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What the industry told us

The same problem came back in different words from every part of the industry:
“Still using 2D drawings and Excel for checking compliance.”
American Bureau of Shipping
“A laser scan once came back four inches off the drawing.”
Shipyard A
“Doing constant rework because the documents aren’t accurate enough.”
Shipyard B
None of these are software-adoption problems. They are all the same problem seen from three angles: the record of the ship and the ship itself have drifted apart, and no one can tell by how much.

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Where the drift comes from

1

The model was never built, or it died

Older vessels were documented on paper. Newer ones were handed over with CAD files that are now locked in formats nobody can open or edit. Either way, what survives is a picture of the ship, not a usable model of it.
2

Nothing keeps it in sync for the next 25 to 30 years

A ship is repaired, retrofitted, re-plated, and re-piped across its whole service life. Each of those jobs changes the vessel. Almost none of them update the drawings. The gap compounds every availability.
3

The records contradict each other

Drawings say one thing, the CAD file says another, the work order says a third, and the survey report describes a condition none of them mention. There is no authority that resolves the conflict.
4

The context lives in people, not documents

Classification rules, survey history, and the reasoning behind past repairs are scattered across paper, PDFs, and the memory of individual superintendents and port engineers. When they move on, the context goes with them.

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Two versions of the same problem

The starting point differs by fleet, but the destination is the same. A newly delivered ship is not automatically safe from this either. Handover documentation often does not match what was actually built, so a “clean” vessel can enter service with a reconciliation gap already in it.

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Where the cost actually lands

The drift is invisible right up until it is expensive:
  • Scope is discovered in drydock, not in planning. The job is priced and scheduled against drawings, then re-priced against what the yard finds. That is what the contingency line in every drydock budget is really paying for.
  • Rework because the documents were not accurate enough. Parts are fabricated to a drawing that no longer describes the ship.
  • Class findings arrive as surprises. Condition and compliance questions land at survey rather than months earlier, when there was still time to plan for them.
  • Engineering time goes to reconciliation instead of engineering. Technical departments spend planning cycles manually cross-checking records that disagree.

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Why software has not fixed it

The problem is not a shortage of CAD tools. The existing stack is built for designing and building new ships, and it does its job well there. What none of it does is maintain a true model of an existing ship across decades of repair, by people who were not involved in the original design, working from sources that are incomplete and in conflict. That is a different problem, and it is the one Forge is built for.

Read the full background essay

The longer argument, including the strategic and competitive case, lives on our blog.