Marine mobile technology company My-Villages bought the information management software company DockMaster.
By integrating DockMaster software and My-Villages’ consumer and professional application, called the Boat Village, My-Villages will serve more than 600 marinas, several Top 100 service centers, dealers, boatyards and marine service centers in North America and the Caribbean, the companies say.
“The biggest thing I hear from boatyards is that they wish there was a way to connect all that data that is collected by DockMaster and My-Villages provides that,” Cam Collins, president and CEO of DockMaster maker Exuma Technologies, told Trade Only Today.
Collins will become president and chief operating officer of My-Villages, My-Villages founder Kevin Hutchinson told Trade Only.
The merger allows the marine industry to transact business at any time and across time zones, Hutchinson said. “It’s similar to what we see in the retail industry and financial industry,” he said. “What we’re trying to bring to the service industry and marine industry is the ability to engage those customers 24/7.”
Hutchinson said the partnership will allow everything to be done remotely, ranging from the service technician getting a reminder of scheduled maintenance for customers based on the 15,000 manufacturer recommendations that already exist in My-Villages to notifying boat owners or captains, ordering parts, invoicing and so forth.
“This is kind of an end-to-end solution,” Hutchinson said. “The more we talked about the common vision we had, the more we realized it would be great to pull this under one roof.”
Another component is to give the marine industry the ability to truly go mobile, something Collins says will ultimately improve the boaters’ experience in a way his company was previously unable to do.
“Service techs are on their feet all the time, on the go all the time,” Collins said. “Just things like bringing out a time clock app for their mobile device — they can clock on and off the job on their phone.”
“A lot of what drove this discussion was the customer base,” Hutchinson said. “Saunders, Whiticar [Boat Works] and a number of other key strategic partners we had in common, we noticed they were telling us a lot of the same things about what they wanted to be able to do from the front end to the back end.”
“This is like watching two great tools merge into one,” Whiticar Boat Works president Jim Dragseth said in a statement. “The integration of these two products will allow us to further streamline and simplify communication with our boat owners, coordinate service more efficiently and improve customer satisfaction.”
“This is not rocket science,” Hutchinson said. “It’s been done in so many other industries, but we’re just going to be the first to do it in the marine industry.”
— Reagan Haynes
