Emergency repair request SOP (24/7 triage to release)
How a ship-repair yard turns a defect reported on the 24/7 duty line into a triaged, quoted or mobilized repair: urgency triage, customer approval, mechanical/electrical/hydraulic mobilization, function test and vessel release.
What the emergency repair request SOP (24/7 triage to release) process is
A defect call at 02:00 on a Saturday and a defect call at 10:00 on a Tuesday have to be handled by the same procedure, because the duty line is the yard's only intake and it runs every hour of every day. The urgency decision, "Defect affects safety, propulsion or sailing readiness?", sits immediately after triage and before anything else, because that single judgement determines whether the vessel can wait on a written quotation at all. A defect that leaves a vessel unable to manoeuvre or unsafe to sail cannot sit in a quotation queue behind three routine jobs, so it goes straight into mobilizing mechanical, electrical and hydraulic personnel, and the invoice is settled after the fact rather than before it. Put that split anywhere else, after the quote, or leave it to whichever engineer happens to answer the phone that night, and a dry dock slot or a crane booking gets held open for a job that was never actually urgent, or worse, a propulsion fault waits on a customer signature while the vessel is still at the berth it needs to leave.
The decision that does the second half of the work is "Repair is single-discipline or multi-discipline?", because the yard's workshops are organized by trade, mechanical, electrical, hydraulic, and a defect that sounds like one thing over the phone often turns out to touch two or three of them once a technician is standing in the engine room. Routing every job through one on-board assessment before that split, rather than dispatching whichever workshop first answered the mobilization call, is what stops three trades independently discovering the same fault and duplicating the diagnosis. The loop at the far end matters just as much: "System passes function test?" sends a failed repair back to "Return to workshop for further repair" rather than letting it proceed toward handback. Skip that gate under schedule pressure and the failure mode is not abstract, it is a vessel released on a hydraulic repair that was never proven under load, discovered once it is back at sea, with the completion report already signed.
The quotation branch exists for the opposite reason: most calls on the duty line are not emergencies, and treating every one as a mobilize-first event would burn workshop capacity that a genuinely critical defect needs later the same night. A routine defect gets a scope and a price before anyone is dispatched, and the customer decision, "Customer approves scope and price?", has a real no branch, "Revise scope or price and resubmit", that loops back to quotation instead of stalling the request or quietly proceeding without sign-off. Keeping that loop explicit is what lets a Project Manager quote a job at 9pm, have it rejected, and resubmit it without the request falling out of the log.
What this flowchart covers
In this template
- Four lanes, "Vessel / customer", "Duty engineer", "Project Manager" and Workshops, crossing five phases from "Report and triage" through "Classification and scope", "Mobilization" and "Repair and test" to "Release", so every step carries both an owner and a phase.
- The urgency fork, "Defect affects safety, propulsion or sailing readiness?", which sends a critical answer straight to mobilization and a routine one into "Prepare scope and quotation for customer approval" instead, so the same intake step leads to two structurally different routes.
- The customer approval gate, "Customer approves scope and price?", with its rejection path into "Revise scope or price and resubmit", which loops back into quotation rather than leaving a rejected estimate as a dead end.
- A single mobilization step, "Mobilize mechanical, electrical and hydraulic personnel", that both the critical branch and an approved quotation feed into, so Workshops receives one dispatch instruction regardless of which route the request took to get there.
- The on-board assessment and discipline split: "Assess defect on board and confirm repair method" feeds "Repair is single-discipline or multi-discipline?", branching into "Repair carried out by one workshop discipline" or "Repair coordinated across mechanical, electrical and hydraulic teams".
- Verification before handback: "Function test the repaired system" and "System passes function test?" loop a failed repair back into "Return to workshop for further repair" rather than letting "Release vessel and issue completion report" run against an unverified fix.
When to use this template
- Writing or auditing the duty-line procedure so an out-of-hours defect report reaches the same urgency judgement and the same mobilization step no matter which engineer is on call that night.
- A customer disputes why one job was mobilized before it was quoted while another waited on a signed estimate, and you need the urgency criteria and the invoice-after-mobilization rule documented rather than left to memory.
- Onboarding a new duty engineer or Project Manager who needs to see, in one picture, exactly where a critical defect skips quotation and exactly where a routine one does not.
- A repair mobilized three separate trades on the same defect because there was no single on-board assessment gating the single-discipline versus multi-discipline decision, and rework or duplicated diagnosis followed.
- Reviewing a vessel released on a repair that failed at sea, to confirm whether the function test and the pass/fail loop back to the workshop were actually followed on that job.
- Standardizing dispatch across mechanical, electrical and hydraulic workshops so Project Managers stop improvising a mobilization sequence per incident.
How it works
Write down your urgency criteria in words a duty engineer can apply at 3am
"Defect affects safety, propulsion or sailing readiness?" is only as reliable as the examples behind it. List the failure types that always count as critical (loss of steering, loss of propulsion, a breached hull fitting) and the ones that are routine even though they sound urgent to the caller (a non-critical alarm, a comfort system fault). Without that list, the split depends on who is holding the phone.
Name your workshop trades and keep them as separate lanes
Mechanical, electrical and hydraulic are drawn as one Workshops lane here because they share the same assessment and test steps, but if your yard tracks them as separate cost centers or separate on-call rosters, split "Assess defect on board and confirm repair method" into per-trade lanes so dispatch and workload roll up correctly.
State the invoice-after-mobilization rule explicitly
A critical defect skips "Prepare scope and quotation for customer approval" and goes straight to mobilization, with billing settled afterward. Put that rule in writing, including who is authorized to declare a defect critical, so the exception does not read as an engineer bypassing the quotation step without authority.
Set the single-discipline versus multi-discipline threshold
Decide what evidence at "Assess defect on board and confirm repair method" sends a job into "Repair carried out by one workshop discipline" instead of the coordinated, multi-trade branch, for example, whether the fault is confined to one system or has already cascaded into a second one.
Define what a passed function test actually proves
"System passes function test?" needs a stated standard, load, duration, or the specification the system is tested against, not just a technician's sign-off. Attach that standard to the step itself so "Return to workshop for further repair" is triggered by the same bar every time, not by individual judgement.
Assign named owners and track workload against the schedule
This template ships People and Workload on every row. Replace the sample names with your actual duty engineer, Project Manager and workshop leads, and use the workload figures to see where a Saturday-night critical mobilization collides with jobs already queued in the workshop.
Frequently asked questions
What makes a defect "critical" enough to skip the quotation step?
In this template, anything the duty engineer's technical triage flags as affecting safety, propulsion or sailing readiness takes the critical branch straight to mobilization, bypassing "Prepare scope and quotation for customer approval" entirely. The yard settles the invoice after the repair rather than before it. A routine defect, one that does not threaten the vessel's ability to sail safely, always gets a scope and price first.
What happens if the customer rejects the scope and price?
"Customer approves scope and price?" has a Rejected branch into "Revise scope or price and resubmit", which loops back to the same quotation step rather than ending the request. The job stays open and re-enters the approval decision once the revised estimate is ready, so a rejected quote never silently falls out of the process.
Why does the process assess the defect on board before deciding which workshop repairs it?
"Assess defect on board and confirm repair method" happens after mobilization and before the single-discipline versus multi-discipline decision because a defect that sounds like one trade's problem over the phone often turns out to involve two or three once a technician is looking at it directly. Assessing first and branching second avoids dispatching multiple workshops independently to diagnose the same fault.
What happens if the repair fails the function test?
"System passes function test?" routes a Fail outcome to "Return to workshop for further repair", which loops back into the on-board assessment rather than allowing "Release vessel and issue completion report" to run. The vessel is not released, and the completion report is not issued, until a subsequent function test passes.
Can this SOP be adapted for a repair yard that isn't a ship-repair facility?
Yes. The structure, a duty-line intake, an urgency triage that can bypass quotation for genuinely critical faults, a customer approval gate with a revision loop, mobilization into trade-specific repair, and a test-and-release gate with a fail loop, applies to any facility running emergency and routine repair requests through the same intake, from industrial plant maintenance to fleet vehicle repair. Rename the lanes and adjust the urgency criteria to match your own equipment.