Change order approval SOP for a ship repair yard
A change order approval SOP for ship repair: a mid-repair finding is assessed against original scope, estimated, submitted to the customer for approval, executed, QA/QC inspected, and filed on closeout.
How it works
Match the lanes to your yard's real handoffs
Workshops, Project Manager, QA/QC and Customer map to how FAYARD actually hands this work off. If your yard splits QA and QC into separate functions, or routes customer approval through a broker rather than the owner directly, add that lane rather than folding a real handoff into one that doesn't reflect it.
Put a named person and a realistic workload on every row
Use the People and Workload columns on every step, not only the decisions: "Technical assessment of cause and required repair" carries both the workshop lead and a technical reviewer at 1.5 days, and "Perform the additional repair work" carries 6. Workload here means effort, not elapsed calendar time, so a step that runs over three shifts but only takes a person half a day should be recorded as the half-day.
Write the criteria behind the scope decision
"Finding is within original scope or genuinely additional?" is only a fast, consistent gate if the technical lead has a written standard for what counts as in-scope: what the original specification and drawings covered, what a standard survey should have caught, and what genuinely couldn't have been known before the vessel was opened up. Without that standard, the decision becomes a judgment call that shifts depending on who assesses the finding.
Set a limit on the negotiation loop
"Negotiate scope or price with the customer" can resubmit indefinitely as drawn. Decide how many rounds of negotiation are normal before the change order escalates to a commercial manager or gets formally withdrawn, and note that limit next to the decision, so an unresolved dispute doesn't quietly stall a vessel's undocking.
Check the workload panel before you approve the next change order
Because every row carries an owner and an estimate, the workload BI panel totals live change-order hours per person across every open chart, not just this one. Before signing off on a new change order, check whether the project manager or workshop lead it depends on is already carrying more additional-work hours than the vessel's remaining time in dock allows.
Frequently asked questions
What's the difference between the in-scope path and the additional-work path?
The single decision after the technical assessment, "Finding is within original scope or genuinely additional?", is what splits them. In-scope work proceeds under the existing work order and closes immediately with no change order, no customer approval step and no separate cost record, because the work is already covered by the original contract. Genuinely additional work is the only branch that reaches a change order, an estimate and a customer decision, which keeps the change-order process from being invoked for work that never needed it.
Why does a rejected or disputed change order loop through negotiation instead of just closing?
Because in practice almost no disputed change order in ship repair simply goes away: the customer still needs the repair, and the yard still needs to be paid for finding and assessing it. "Negotiate scope or price with the customer" gives the dispute a real step and a named owner instead of letting it get resolved informally over email, and looping back to resubmission means the final agreed price and scope go through the same formal approval as the original proposal, not a side agreement that never gets filed.
Why does a failed QA/QC inspection loop back to re-inspection and not back to performing the repair?
"Rework and re-inspect" is deliberately one step, feeding back into "QA/QC inspects the additional repair" rather than restarting the whole repair. A failed inspection is normally a correction to work that's largely complete, not evidence the entire job needs redoing, and routing rework through the identical inspection step means the pass/fail record for that repair always reflects the same inspector checking against the same standard, which matters if the vessel's classification society later asks for the inspection trail.
What do the People and Workload columns add to a change order SOP like this one?
They turn the diagram from a description of the process into a live account of who's doing it and how much of their time it's taking. Every step here carries a named person and a workload figure in days, and QueryChart's workload panel rolls those figures up across every open chart, so a project manager can see that, say, the same estimator is carrying change-order hours on three vessels at once before that shows up as a missed customer deadline. A process map with no owners is a description; with People and Workload attached, it's a resourcing tool.
Does this SOP apply outside ship repair?
The shape is common to any project-based repair or contracting business where the scope is only fully known once work has started: heavy equipment overhaul, industrial plant turnarounds, construction remediation. The lane names and the specific decision criteria should change to match the trade, but the underlying discipline, an explicit scope decision, a formal customer approval with a negotiation route, and an inspection gate before closeout, transfers directly.