Yeoman Marine Group: A Sovereign ERP for Shipbuilding, Without the Licence Bill

The Client

Yeoman Marine Group runs ship repair and refit, shipbuilding and fabrication, and heavy engineering across eight locations in India, with several hundred employees and a target of multi-fold revenue growth over the next three to five years. Operations are project-centric, span domestic and international procurement, and lean heavily on subcontracting and field execution.

The Problem

The business was transitioning from decentralised, service-led ship repair to integrated, project-driven shipbuilding — one of the most demanding ERP categories that exists. Engineer-to-order manufacturing, serialised component teardown lifecycles, multi-level work-breakdown structures, and progress-driven cost control sat on a patchwork of Zoho Books, Zoho CRM, and Excel. On top of that came a strict data-sovereignty mandate: single-tenant, India-resident hosting, customer-managed encryption keys, and no cross-border data flows — a constraint most SaaS ERP vendors simply cannot meet.

What We Architected

• Apache OFBiz as the foundation: a mature, Apache-licensed open-source ERP. Zero perpetual licence cost, complete source-code ownership, and full freedom to deploy on-premise — the entire licence budget is redirected into capability instead of subscriptions.
• An India compliance layer: GST (CGST/SGST/IGST), e-invoicing, e-way bills, and TDS/TCS built as a custom taxation extension against certified GSP APIs — stated plainly as custom work, not over-claimed as out-of-the-box.
• Marine & shipbuilding extensions: multi-level WBS with automatic progress roll-up, defect-list decomposition, subcontract management, and heat-number genealogy for defence-grade material traceability — packaged as isolated plugins so upstream security updates never break custom code.
• A sovereign infrastructure layer: TLS 1.3 termination, mandatory MFA via Keycloak, AES-256 database encryption with customer-managed keys in HashiCorp Vault (hosted in India), SIEM log retention, and segmented network zones isolating sensitive defence project data.
• Best-of-breed integrations: Primavera P6 for advanced scheduling, PLM for CAD/BOM sync, and Apache Superset dashboards on a read replica for analytics.

Why These Choices

The honest answer to "which ERP fits shipbuilding plus sovereignty plus budget?" is: none, off the shelf. Proprietary suites bring deep native modules but lock the client into per-user licence fees that scale painfully — an estimated US$650,000 to $1.4 million over five years for a 50-user deployment. The open-source architecture we proposed lands in an estimated US$90,000–250,000 range for the same horizon — roughly a 70% lower total cost of ownership — while giving Yeoman something no vendor offers: full ownership of every line of code and every byte of data, inside India.

The Roadmap

Delivery is phased operations-control-first: Phase 1 stabilises finance, procurement, inventory, and project accounting; Phase 2 adds execution depth (timesheets, QA/QC, banking integrations); Phase 3 integrates scheduling, PLM, and analytics; Phase 4 targets full digital-yard capability with MES and IoT integration. Every capability claim in the proposal was classified honestly — native, configurable, custom, or third-party — because an ERP partnership built on over-claiming fails in year one.