Flex in the maritime supply chain

Many of our customers and prospects in the maritime supply chain have more than only one role. Often there are different accents or specializations. This can be based on locations, vessel types, cargo types, or available warehouse facilities and therefore different services, etcetera, each creating a different challenge for IT applications. 

Traditionally, but still true today, these challenges were solved by introducing separate software solutions into the company for each operational aspect. Then these software islands would be interfaced with a financial backbone for general ledger and reporting purposes.

What makes it even harder are the situations where services of an organization are carried out by different or multiple entities, located in different countries. This may duplicate data entry, needs more complex interfaces and also means more applications to setup, maintain and support (locally).

We at Ultimate believe that we have a maritime logistics solution, based on the Microsoft’s Dynamics AX 2012 platform, that can handle these challenges. No more islands, but a central model, combined with the multi company ERP functionality of AX. This makes it possible to have different company services in the same solution and database, simply by parameterizing each company for the functionality needed. Now and in the future.

This way an organization that offers for instance transport and forwarding services, but also operates its own terminal can do this in one installation, application and database. Setup and operational data is shared between companies where needed and processes are controlled according validated business rules and workflows.

Benefits for organizations can be huge:

• lower TCO (total cost of ownership)
• no island, no bridges
• seamless flow of information through the system
• much less interfacing trouble
• thorough integration of operational and finance
• organization wide implementation (central model)
• organization wide consolidation and BI
• better control and compliancy
• Dynamics AX / SQL / Office integration
• etcetera

We launch the AX 2012 version of the solution. For more information: sales@ultimatesoftware.nl