COMPASS · DEFENCE AND GOVERNMENT MARINE MANUFACTURING
Seventy years of precision vessel construction for government and defence. With limited formal documentation of its processes.
Six prioritised opportunities, a phased roadmap, and a governance framework built to match the quality of the vessels.
A commercial shipbuilder with over 70 years of government and defence contracts. Eight operational systems, most working in isolation. Proposals and technical manuals assembled by hand. Job costing based on estimates. The Australian Government's Essential Eight cybersecurity framework, increasingly a threshold requirement for defence tender eligibility, never formally assessed.
5 stakeholders. 8 systems reviewed. Factory walk-throughs. Process mapping across tender preparation, contract creation, operator manual production, parts ordering, payroll, and client invoicing.
6 prioritised opportunities. A phased 24-month roadmap. A 90-day action plan with specific success measures. An Essential Eight baseline with a clear uplift path to meet government and defence tender thresholds. A governance framework covering AI policy, role evolution, and change management.
Seventy years of craft excellence deserved systems built to the same standard.
The Organisation
An established commercial shipbuilder supplying government and defence clients. Over 70 years of precision vessel construction. Small, highly skilled workforce. ISO9001 certified. Quality and safety frameworks aligned to government and defence contract requirements. Much of the operational expertise and institutional knowledge held by a small number of senior individuals, creating both a continuity consideration and a strategic impetus for the engagement.
The Situation
Eight operational platforms supporting design, production, administration, and client engagement, most in isolation. Proposals assembled manually, page by page, from templates. Technical manuals: time-intensive, person-dependent, built by hand. Job costing: estimate-based, because labour and materials moved between projects in ways no system captured precisely. Client correspondence stored in individual inboxes with no centralised archive.
Government and defence tender panels now evaluate suppliers on demonstrated digital maturity, including cybersecurity posture. The Essential Eight framework had become a de facto threshold requirement for defence contract eligibility. The business had never assessed its position against it.
The Work
Factory walk-throughs from design through build, quality assurance, and handover. Review of all 8 operational systems. Five stakeholder interviews. Process mapping across tender preparation, contract creation, operator manual production, parts ordering, payroll, and client invoicing. Formal Essential Eight baseline assessment across all eight controls.
The roadmap decision was pacing. A small team with active delivery commitments could not absorb wholesale transformation without risk to the contracts that sustained it. Southern Sky AI sequenced the 6 opportunities across a three-phase Crawl-Walk-Run roadmap spanning 24 months, with each phase building the technical and cultural foundations the next required.
The Outcome
6 prioritised AI and digital opportunities across a 24-month roadmap. 90-day action plan with specific success measures across the first three phases. Essential Eight baseline with a clear uplift path to meet government and defence tender thresholds. Governance framework covering AI policy, role evolution, and change management principles.
The knowledge held in people's heads had a capture plan. The cyber posture that tender panels would assess had a remediation path. The craft the business had built its reputation on now had a roadmap for the systems to support it.
The Standard Applied
Every recommendation was tested against one question: could the business execute this without disrupting the delivery obligations that kept it viable? Foundational work came first. Transformation in a small, delivery-dependent operation must be staged carefully enough that the business remains fully operational at every step.