Yacht management platform DeepBlue has introduced a new feature called Rounds, designed to turn the routine walk-through of the engine room, deck, or safety equipment into a structured, phone-based process that feeds directly into the vessel's planned maintenance system.
On yachts already using DeepBlue, readings were grouped and entered on a desktop, but the walk itself followed no fixed structure, leaving the order of checks and what to inspect at each stop down to habit rather than a defined process. Rounds introduces that structure directly into the workflow crew already follow.
A round is built once on desktop, drawing its steps from the vessel's own equipment register and setting them in order. Each step corresponds to a specific piece of equipment, either a reading with its unit and instruction, or an existing planned maintenance job complete with description and history. Once published, a round is locked, meaning any changes create a new revision, so every completed round shows exactly which version was followed. If equipment changes, during a refit for example, a new revision follows while the readings remain stored against the same equipment, keeping its history unbroken.
Crew carry out rounds through the DeepBlue mobile app, seeing their assigned rounds listed by status, due date and crew position. Each step is completed at the equipment itself, with photos and comments attached directly to the relevant reading.
Rounds can be scheduled by crew position, run on demand, set to a rolling interval, or fixed to a calendar, with reminders built in. At the equipment, crew see the last 10 readings alongside the input field, and the system rejects a running-hours entry lower than the previous reading. Planned maintenance jobs can be completed as steps within a round, with job history visible and spare parts used recorded, while one-off jobs can be raised against any equipment either immediately or scheduled for later. Every completed round is saved to the equipment's history and logbook, reviewed before closing and exportable as a step-by-step PDF report.
The same structure extends beyond the engine room, with deck and safety teams able to run their own rounds using the same process.
“Rounds is one of the features clients have asked us for most often. Most yachts already walk rounds; what changes is who records the reading and when,” said Maks Obelšer, chief product officer at DeepBlue. "With Rounds on the phone, the people who walk the round are the ones who record it, and what they record lands in the same system the chief engineer plans maintenance from and the management company reviews."
Obelšer added that the value lies in traceability: "A maintenance plan is only as good as the readings behind it. Rounds means those readings come from the equipment, not from someone's notes. Because every step is a real piece of equipment from the vessel's register, the engineer sees its last values while entering the new one, and anything unusual is noticed at the gauge rather than later at a desk."