Firm customizes manuals for exporters to EU
By David W. Shaw
One of the few bright spots in these
tough times for the U.S. boating industry has been exports of pleasure craft to
countries within the European Union.
After rising 23 percent in 2007 over
2006, exports are expected to be
strong this year as well, according to
the latest data from the National Marine
Manufacturers Association. This results
in part from the weakness of the U.S.
dollar in comparison with the euro,
making purchases of American-made
boats attractive to European buyers.
But boatbuilders trying to reap the rewards of selling in the EU face regulatory snags that can end up stranding boats
in the customs yard. In 1994, the EU issued the Recreational Craft Directive —
essentially a regulation that required extensive product documentation specific
to every vessel. It was amended in 2003
to cover personal watercraft and to require data on engine exhaust and sound
emissions. To comply with the direc-
tive, U.S. boat manufacturers provide an
owner manual that includes boat-specif-ic data in the language of the country to
which the boat is being shipped.
Any omission in the manual, even a
minor one, will maroon a boat in a sea
of red tape.
“We get urgent calls every month from
boatbuilders who have boats stuck in
customs because of a documentation
problem,” says Tim McAdow, vice president of sales and marketing for Milwaukee-based Ken Cook Co., which special-
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izes in providing product documentation
for a variety of business sectors, including recreational marine. “The cost to the
boatbuilder can be significant,” he says.
In response to the EU directive, Ken
Cook Co. began selling generic, multi-language international boat manuals to
help boatbuilders provide the required
data. Users filled in the blanks, customizing the manual for a specific boat.
As helpful as the generic manuals were,
however, the process of entering the
data was arduous and rife with the potential for error and omission.
About two years ago, on a case-by-case basis, Ken Cook Co. started customizing manuals for boatbuilders, says
Kenneth J. Cook, the company’s president and CEO. “The complexity involved in getting boats accepted at the
ports was a key driver behind the customized manuals,” he says.
The push to develop a service to enable boatbuilders to automate customization of export documentation began in
earnest at the company last year. The
end result was BookBuilder, a new subscription service through Ken Cook
Co.’s Web portal www.boatpubs.com,
which was being introduced in October
at the International BoatBuilders’ Exhibition & Conference in Miami Beach.
“When you think of having all this information for a specific hull number,
you’re down to printing one manual at
a time,” says John Jost, Ken Cook Co.’s
director of software solutions, who
oversaw the project. “We were able to
marry the online application that allows
people to build their own customized
manual, and our special system that allows you to economically and automatically print and bind a single manual.”
The ability to include drawings and
schematics, and to create a cover showing the boat was important to boatbuilders, says Tom Morris, senior sales executive. “Our customers wanted an actual picture of the boat on the cover of the
manual, so that the customs agent could
compare the U.S. manual in the boat to
the international manual. Both manuals
had to match in every way,” says Morris.
Large companies can create a manual
for multiple units of a single model,
plug in the hull identification number
applicable to each vessel, and produce
as many manuals as needed. Smaller
boatbuilders can create and produce a
manual for a single boat. The software
provides access to 19 languages bundled in five language sets, facilitating
the translation process.
After a boatbuilder has collected all the
information on a specific model, it can
send the data electronically to Ken Cook
Co. for uploading into the customer’s
private library on the Web site. Getting a
BookBuilder program started should take
less than 30 days, according to McAdow.
In addition to demos at IBEX, the company will launch a direct marketing campaign primarily targeted to North American boatbuilders.
