The template belongs to the vessel maintenance deferrals guide, which explains what a deferral chain holds. Use it after one conversation with the technical director, then check your draft against the completed example.
Fill-in brief: eight fields for the technical director
Copy the fields and replace each bracket with a short phrase, a count, a role or "to be confirmed".
- Company: [Ship manager, owner-operator or both; staff ashore; seagoing staff and whether employed directly]
- Fleet: [Number of ships; ship types; owned versus managed for third parties]
- Systems: [Planned maintenance system; document control or safety management system; where shore approvals are recorded]
- Years of history: [Oldest closed deferral readable today; any archived database for older years]
- Record volumes: [Deferrals a year across the fleet, roughly; share closed with a linked sign-off, if known]
- Records owner: [Who maintains the history day to day]
- Authorized contact: [Who can approve a licensing discussion for the manager; owner's representative where relevant]
- Open question and deadline: [The one thing nobody can confirm; any documented access end date, with its source]
End every brief with: Not included: defect reports, approvals, crew or ship names, screenshots, exports or any estimate of value.
Field notes for marine fleets
Company and fleet are two fields on purpose. The introduced company needs 50+ full-time employees at peak, contractors excluded, so the company field counts people and states how seafarers are employed. The fleet field counts ships. A large fleet run by a small office and a small fleet run by a large owner-operator read very differently.
Owned versus managed decides the authority field. The ISM Code's "Company" can be the owner or a manager that has taken on responsibility for operating the ship, so the people who keep the records may not be the people who own them. BIMCO's SHIPMAN 2024 added provisions on owners' access to and ownership of ship data in the manager's information system. If any ships are managed for others, the authority field should name the owner's representative as well; the who-can-license decision tree shows how to work it out.
Years of history are counted per system. Ask when the current planned maintenance system was installed and whether older data sits in an archived database. A ship keeps its IMO number for life, through changes of name, flag and owner, but internal job and equipment numbers often change with each new system, so older years may be harder to join.
The deadline must have a source. A management contract end, a license expiry or a server shutdown, each with the document it comes from. If there is none, write "none set". The retention timeline explains which records disappear first in a handover.
Completed brief (Illustrative): a manager losing four ships
Illustrative wording for a fictional manager. Every count and date is invented.
| Field | Entry |
|---|---|
| Company | Ship manager with about 90 staff ashore and 150 seafarers on direct contracts |
| Fleet | Twelve offshore supply ships; eight owned by the group, four managed for one third-party owner |
| Systems | Planned maintenance system; document control; superintendent mailboxes for approvals |
| Years of history | Closed deferrals back to 2017 in the current system; older history in an archived database |
| Record volumes | About 700 deferrals a year across the fleet; most closed against the same job number |
| Records owner | Technical director |
| Authorized contact | Managing director for the group's ships; owner's representative to be confirmed for the four managed ships |
| Open question and deadline | Whether the management agreement assigns records for the four ships to the owner. Outgoing system access for them ends when the management contract ends |
Not included: defect reports, approvals, crew or ship names, screenshots, exports or any estimate of value.
The open question is deliberately one sentence. It tells SourceX where the rights review should start, and it tells the managing director why the owner may need to join the call.
The message you send with it
A brief travels with two or three sentences on top. Something like:
"I'd like to introduce SourceX, which licenses approved business data directly from companies for AI training and evaluation. The note below describes our deferral history at summary level only. SourceX would review fit, rights and what could be included, and nothing is shared until we agree."
If you send it yourself rather than the technical director, disclose that you may receive a referral reward. The company is paid under its own agreement with SourceX and the reward is funded separately, so it never reduces that payment. Illustrative only: if SourceX paid the company $250,000, the default reward would be $62,500. A reward becomes payable after SourceX has paid the referred company under its signed agreement and the payout conditions in the program terms are met, including finance approval and your tax and payment details.](/rewards) shows the rule.
For tone, the warm introduction brief covers a first message to an owner. ERP consultants working in marine systems will find role-specific advice on the ERP consultants page and in MCP for ERP consulting, and the client opportunity brief generator can produce a first draft from your notes.
Before it goes out: a final check
- Every field is metadata, and the closing "not included" line is present.
- The authority field names a decision-maker, not only the records owner, and flags any third-party owner.
- The company meets the basics: 50+ full-time employees at peak (contractors excluded), a documented operating history, rights to license and an authorized contact. Companies in the U.S., Canada and the EU qualify, as do companies in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, India, Singapore, South Africa, Latin America, the UAE and Saudi Arabia when at least 90% of the data is in English.
- You have signed the Channel Partner Agreement. The first valid introduction within the 90-day window is credited when the company submits a verified application.
What stays unknown until SourceX reviews it: buyer interest in deferral records, how crew and ship identifiers would be treated, the owner-manager rights split and any offer. Other sectors are on the industries hub.
Next step
Refer a company. Earn up to $100,000. Default reward: 25% of Actual Supplier Payout, capped at $100,000 cumulatively per referred company. Eligibility and payment conditions apply, and a signed Schedule A or addendum can differ. A lead, meeting or signature alone does not trigger payment.
When all eight fields are filled with metadata and the authority field names who can say yes, register as a partner, confirm the company on who qualifies and read the terms before the brief is forwarded.