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IT Strategy for Leading Container Terminal Operator
Company
One of the world’s largest operators of container terminals turned to Calsoft for help in devising an ERP strategy. The company, known for operating terminals at very high levels of efficiency was looking for an IT strategy that would fuel the growth of the company.
The company operates more than 35 terminals across the globe and is on a high growth path through developing new container terminals and taking over existing terminals. It has been imperative that the company should have necessary IT infrastructure in place to support the growth and meet the business challenges of - share knowledge and the industry best-practices across existing terminals and newly added terminals; achieve economy of scale through consolidation across terminals and enhancing group bargaining power - a right mix of centralized and decentralized functions; and provide advance, comprehensive and user friendly administrative IT tool for senior management.
Calsoft looked into the various options available in the ERP market in the light of certain internal and external constraints and came out with a recommendation that would be best suitable for the company. This would form the basis of the organizations IT strategy for the next 5 years.
Challenge
The terminals across the globe were using a number of enterprise applications, thus making consolidation extremely difficult. SAP was being implemented at all the terminals for financial management. A strategy was also in place to implement IFS for the maintenance management, procurement and inventory management of spares. Most of the terminals used NAVIS for the terminal operations.
The ownership patterns of the terminals also varied. While some were fully or majority owned by the company, others were joint ventures with minority stakes with other companies. This also impacted the IT strategy as the terminals where the company owned a minority stake tended to be more independent in their decision making.
Considerations
Based on discussions with the company officials, following four ERP applications were identified.
- SAP R3 ERP
- Oracle Applications
- IFS
- Navision
The identified vendor(s) were analyzed on their adequate capability and well laid out application roadmap to support expected future growth and the companies business requirements.
The project was initiated with compiling a higher level/ standard list of requirements that are expected from ERP software. A priority was assigned to these requirements/features. The four identified applications were rated for each of the required features. The ratings were based on the applications ability to address the requirements. In addition, an extensive secondary market research was done to understand the application vendor capabilities and the business as well as technology trends in the industry.
Benefits
- Well Laid out strategy to support fast inorganic growth
- Short term and long term strategy
- Separate strategy by size of terminal
- Maximize Return on Investment