Skip to main content
A workboat is inspected by its master, serviced by a mechanic, surveyed by a regulator and audited by a client — four groups, three systems, and one hull.

​
Where QRtub fits

A fleet of around thirty aluminum workboats runs like this. The boats are assets in one platform, where masters record pre-operation checks and raise actions and in-house mechanics record outboard services. The compliance documents — survey and survey-exemption certificates — live in an entirely different system, which most staff have no easy access to. So the code on the hull has to reach both. That is the shape QRtub is for: one address per boat, several destinations behind it, and the choice of which is a setting rather than something decided when the plate was made.

​
What gets tagged

  • Hulls, at the helm and at the transom
  • Outboards and inboard engines, serviced on their own cycle
  • Trailers, which move between boats
  • Safety equipment with expiry dates — lifejackets, EPIRBs, extinguishers
  • Ancillary gear that leaves the boat and comes back

​
QRtub is particularly useful when

  • Nothing adhesive survives. Salt water, UV, wash-down and hard use mean stickers last weeks. Photo-anodized aluminum riveted to the hull is the only reliable answer — and it is not economical to produce one at a time.
  • The boat has to be tagged before it exists in software. A new vessel cannot be given a code that points at an asset record and a compliance file it does not yet have.
  • Compliance lives somewhere most staff cannot reach. A certificate everyone needs, in a system only administrators use, is a certificate nobody reads.
  • People pick the wrong asset. Navigating an inspection app by hand to find one of thirty similar boats produces inspections filed against the wrong hull — which is worse than a missing inspection, because it looks like compliance and is not. A scan of that boat’s own plate cannot choose wrongly.
  • The fleet is spread across the country and the person holding the phone is not the person who set the system up.

​
The problems you’ll hit

  1. One tag, your team and the public — masters, mechanics, surveyors and clients from one plate
  2. Make the installation earn its keep — a plate that reaches the certificate, not just the asset record
  3. Let anyone report a fault — a defect raised from the water

​
Works with

The pattern worth copying from that fleet: one text field per external system, holding that boat’s own URL or ID, with the Destination built from it. Adding a second system later is a field and a button, not a re-plate.

​
Typical Item fields

Vessel name · fleet number · hull identification · asset ID in your inspection platform · compliance record URL · survey expiry · engine hours · home port · last pre-operation check