: HARBOR MANAGEMENT
Bringing recreational harbor management into the 21st century
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“One of our goals was to bring consistency to the procedures of each office and get away from local-style rules...” In outlining their capabilities, Jay Rainaldi, Director, Government Solutions for Yardi, noted that the project was an intriguing one for them. “We are not typically a custom software shop since our out-of-the-box functionality is usually more than enough for our real estate clients,” he said, albeit noting that, from time to time, a project will come up that requires a number of pieces of functionality from across Yardi’s full suite of software. Rainaldi gave examples such as customizing software to accommodate some of the larger banks in the U.S. as well as customizing their residential product to work with military clients. “We had already been talking internally about developing greater functionalities for recreational harbor management and this project allowed us to pursue that idea.” When Yardi met with Yim and his team, the first goal was developing a ‘wish list’ of functional requirements to be built into the system. “It’s a bit of a trial-and-error process,” said Rainaldi.
Photo courtesy of DOBOR
hen Hawaii’s Division of Boating and Ocean Recreation (DOBOR) decided it was time to “get rid of the 3x5 index cards” that constituted their management system, Kevin Yim was tasked with being the agent of change. Yim couldn’t imagine the changes in store for him and his team. As the Boating Staff Officer for the Division — one of nine within the Department of Land and Natural Resources — Yim oversees the management of Hawaii’s 16 recreational harbors, commercial property, permitting for all activities within three miles of Hawaii’s shores, and vessel registration and titling. To assist him with the task, he turned to Yardi, a leading provider of high-performance software solutions. “We have a mix of very different types of businesses,” Yim said in describing the decision-making process to bring all portfolios under one system and interface. “Our responsibilities are so diverse — for example, tracking vacancies, keys, and security deposits for tenants of the recreational marinas, maintaining leases for our commercial properties plus issuing and tracking permits for near-shore activities as well as vessel registration and titling.”
Just one of 16 recreational harbors under Yim’s portfolio. 20 — PACIFIC PORTS — April 2021
“As you move from development of the software to implementation and then seeing how staff are using it, there would be additional requirements identified that had to be worked into the system, things that weren’t considered in the first roll-out — extra fields, for example.” Both he and Yim also noted that, while implementing the system, new responsibilities were being added from different parts of the state “so it required a lot of flexibility and being nimble enough to respond to these in real time,” said Rainaldi. As the project progressed, Yim recalled there were a number of challenges, starting with bringing all of the data online — more than 20 years’ worth — as well as changing the mindset of staff. “Our operations cover four divisions — the Islands of Hawaii, Kauai, Maui, Lanai, Molokai, and Oahu as well as Honolulu, the largest city and county in the U.S. and each of the islands were interpreting the rules differently,” he said. “One of our goals was to bring consistency to the procedures of each office and get away from local-style rules. We also had to train staff in basic computer skills as well as ‘un-learn’ bad habits.” Yim gave a lot of credit to Yardi’s project manager, Rachel Nowacky. “She addressed a lot of our challenges very quickly. She helped us bring about 700 accounts into the system at the beginning of the process and then smoothed out some of the issues and trained the staff to get them comfortable with the interface,” he said, adding that they held weekly meetings over the span of
