Crowley Maritime Corporation

Like most companies in the transportation industry, we were a regulated industry which meant we didn’t have to compete. We didn’t really have to focus on the customer at all. Deregulation happened in 1998 which really changed fundamentally how we as a company had to think about our operations.

Video Transcript

Gary Jones – Crowley Maritime Corporation, Vice President of IT
Saru Seshadri – Ultramatics, Founder & CTO

Gary Jones: Our primary business is in liner shipping, transportation. We also do marine salvage, vessel design, pretty much anything that touches the water, we are probably involved with.

Like most companies in the transportation industry, we were a regulated industry which meant we didn’t have to compete. We didn’t really have to focus on the customer at all. Deregulation happened in 1998 which really changed fundamentally how we as a company had to think about our operations.

All of our processes were internal processes, really about managing our vessels and managing our shipping schedules. Very little of our processes focused on the customer. It was very difficult for us as an organization to change and meet those needs. So it became very obvious that we had to do something differently.

So the direction we wanted to go was could we leverage the investments that we had, could we look at opportunities to modernize the mainframe applications and could we leverage some of the newer technologies out there.

We decided to partner with Ultramatics for a lot of reasons. We had confidence in their technical skills, their ability to deliver a solution. Their relationship with IBM helped us to work through some of those challenges that we had early on.

Saru Seshadri: it was a fairly challenging proposition because Crowley has been in the business for 120 years, which meant that they had a lot of applications and systems that were in place already.

Gary Jones: So the approach we took and the direction we had was what can we do in terms of modernizing what we have in place today because if you look at those applications, the business rules, the business logic had been built over about 30 years.

Rip and replace was not an option for us for a number of reasons. One was, it was very risky for our business. We couldn’t stop to replace applications. We had to keep the business going.

Saru Seshadri: Early on, we identified that some level of an integration platform was required first to integrate the legacy applications to the newer packages that are going to be rolled out. Once we rolled out those integration platforms, we used the WebSphere Business Integration suite of products, such as the WebSphere Message Broker, WebSphere Process Server, WebSphere MQ.

Through that process, we also discovered opportunities to take a look at the customer experience.

Gary Jones: One of the things that we wanted to do was to open up our applications, provide the ability to do customer self-service with the idea that if we could capture our customers and we could embed our processes into their processes, we had a greater opportunity of keeping them for the long term.

Saru Seshadri: We delivered a self-service portal using the IBM WebSphere Portal technologies and at the back-end integrating using the same integration platform that we have with the mainframe applications as well.

Gary Jones: Benefits for the customers with the solution that we have implemented is they are able to do bookings for their shipments a lot quicker. They are able to get immediate notification as to the status of that booking.

The biggest benefit for us has been cost reduction. Before we implemented the solution, we had a large number of people just managing these manual processes… We have been able to streamline the processes, so it's simpler across all the different functions within Crowley to be able to service the customer.

We are working a lot smarter. We are a lot more efficient. We are a lot more cost effective. So really, it’s positioned us well, not only for today but it does set the foundation for what we want to do for the future.