Leading Provider of Marine Bulk Cargo Handling and Delivery Services works with Apps Associates’ Advisory Practice on Oracle Systems Health Check

Our customer is a world-leading provider of marine dry bulk cargo handling and delivery services. Through its major operating divisions in Canada, Americas, Australia, Asia, and Europe – our customer owns and operates a highly diversified fleet of specialized self-unloading vessels, off-shore transhippers and handy size bulk carriers, and delivers more than 78 million tons of cargo to industrial customers annually. Our customer has approximately 1,500 people worldwide – both shipboard and ashore –and the company history can be traced back to 1845. Our customer does over $489 M in revenue annually.

This customer engaged with the Apps Associates Advisory practice to perform an Oracle systems health check targeted at Oracle Cloud Financials, Procurement, HCM, EPM and integrations. They were interested in understanding best practices in relation to configuration and software use, as well as addressing system pain points occurring in their organization across multiple areas. Other challenges included underutilized reporting, manual processes, and lack of integration. Customer objectives for the health check were to identify “quick hit, big wins” across all areas, as well as long-term system and process improvements that lead to cost savings and improved efficiency.

The Apps Associates’ team worked with the customer team to understand their business process areas. Diagnostic tools were utilized to verify configurations and to provide additional context. Meeting with the key business personnel and leadership, Apps Associates conducted 18 workshops over five weeks. The findings uncovered 100+ recommendations and cost estimates for areas of follow-up within finance as well as reporting and analytics across the US and Europe. The workshops gave the customer team insight into what was available to them, how they could leverage it and how it would help them overcome their pain points to achieve their goals.

Upon presenting Apps Associates’ top findings and recommendations detailing 30+ major pain point areas along with recommendations for process and system improvements, the customer wanted to pursue over 17 of the recommendations to help achieve their objectives. The customer has engaged with next steps and a Statement of Work to move forward with a financials architect to further assist with ad hoc consultation in a staff augmented capacity. Additionally, customer is leveraging our recommendations regarding financial data conversion and engaging with a separate Statement of Work to move forward with programmatic conversion of ledger balances, as well as our testing and execution of the solution. Future enhancement and automation work is currently under consideration.