Michael UngarCEO of the Industry 4.0 Club

Building Bespoke Cruise Ship Engines: A Deep Dive

21 Apr 2026 · 1 min

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The excerpt explains how a manufacturer builds a custom cruise‑ship engine using an engineer‑to‑order (ETO) approach. Top engineers first meet with the customer to define precise requirements and iterate on possible solutions. Once a concept is agreed, commercial teams calculate pricing and assess financial risk, while engineers re‑evaluate technical risks. The process is lengthy, consumes senior talent, and carries the danger of cost overruns, but it guarantees that the customer receives an engine that exactly matches their specifications, a common practice in high‑value manufacturing.

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The cruise ship is getting built, and you need to make an engine in there. It's going to be bespoke. So what happens there is that your best engineers sit down with the customer, and they work out what the customer needs and go back and forth on what a potential solution could be. Then the commercial people get involved trying to find out what should we price this thing at, how do we ensure that we're not going to go into negative numbers here with that, where the engineers again have to get involved and look at the risks, et cetera. Yeah. It's a long, drawn-out process. Your best people are being used for it. And there is the risk that you're going to lose money on this thing if things go wrong. But it is— customer gets exactly what they want. So that's why engineer-to-order is actually something you see a lot in manufacturing.