The part is on the shelf before the trade needs it. Everything about that sentence is a logistics decision, not a warehousing one.
Refit schedules are rarely lost to work being slow. They are lost to work not starting: a trade ready, a space available, and the part somewhere between a supplier and a customs broker.
Moving the stores next to the berth is the least interesting fix for that and one of the most effective.
Why proximity is not a detail
A trade that has to leave the vessel to find a part loses far more than the walk. It loses the setup, the access it had arranged, and frequently the slot — because in a busy shed the space it vacates gets used by somebody else. Repeated across a day and a floor, that is a measurable fraction of the programme.
Putting stock within a short walk of the work does not make anyone work faster. It removes a class of interruption, which is not the same thing and is worth more.
Nothing in a refit is slower than a trade waiting for something that is already in the country.
What sits behind the shelf
- Sourcing in house. Purchasing done by the yard rather than by each trade separately, so lead times are known before a schedule is built around them.
- Customs and freight handled here, because an import delay is invisible until it is critical, and by then there is no room to absorb it.
- Bonded storage on site, so material can arrive early without a tax consequence for arriving early.
- Stock held against the programme, not against a catalogue. What is on the shelf is what the vessels in the sheds are going to need.
What it means on the invoice
Two things, and only one of them is obvious. The obvious one is fewer delay days. The less obvious one is fewer substitutions — the quiet cost of a schedule under pressure, where a specified part is replaced by an available one because waiting is no longer possible.
Substitution is where specifications erode. It happens gradually, is individually defensible every time, and produces a vessel that does not match her own documentation. Holding the right stock close to the work is how that conversation is avoided rather than won.
Written at the yard in Tuzla. Figures quoted are the ones we record on the job and hand over with the vessel.