Financial Services Industry Case Study
Norwegian Shipbroker Increases Sales, Competitive Edge with Integrated Solution
Overview
Country/Region: Norway
Industry: Financial Services, Consulting
Customer Profile
Lorentzen & Stemoco (L&S) is a ship brokering and consulting company based in Oslo, Norway with offices around the world. It has 73 employees and 100 personal computers.
Business Situation
Poorly integrated shipping brokerage and communication systems meant that L&S brokers did not have an efficient way to access and share up-to-date customer and business data to land the best deals for their clients.
Solution
L&S standardized on Microsoft® technologies to create an integrated, global communications and customer relationship management solution that provided all brokers with instant access to current business data, anytime, anywhere.
Benefits
n Improved information access and sharing
n Better customer service
n Improved competitive position
n Increased sales
n Reduced operational costs / “An integrated Microsoft solution makes us more productive and more profitable. We’ve been around for almost a hundred years. This is the solution to help us meet our goals for the next century.”
Axel Lorentzen, Chairman, Lorentzen & Stemoco
Axel Lorentzen, Chairman, Lorentzen & Stemoco
Oslo, Norway-based Lorentzen & Stemoco (L&S) is a shipping brokerage firm whose 73 skilled personnel serve clients 24 hours a day. For L&S brokers, access to real-time market and client information is critical: data from global contacts gets the best deals for clients. L&S’s disparate systems made it difficult to access and share information, so the company standardized on Microsoft® technologies to create an integrated communications solution. Now brokers have anytime, anywhere access to customer information through Microsoft Office programs from the desktop and on portable devices. Brokers also access customer information via a familiar, central interface using an information portal built on Microsoft Windows® SharePoint® Services. The integrated software opens communication lines across the company, improving customer service, increasing sales, and boosting its
competitive edge.
Situation
Norway has an illustrious shipping tradition that for centuries has shaped the country’s economy. Lorentzen & Stemoco, based in Oslo, epitomizes that tradition: In business since the 1920’s, the company has evolved over the years to become an international competitive shipping broker. It acts as the mediating negotiator for business deals between ship owners and charters of cargo, and between buyers and sellers of ships and offshore installations. The company handles two types of business: long-term relationships providing clients consulting advice on strategic sales, purchasing, contracting, and chartering advice; and international ship brokering, which is a minute-by-minute business in a highly competitive niche market.
With 73 employees disbursed among offices in Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, and Singapore, and partnering with joint venture companies in Antwerp and Paris, the company has a global reach, but does business with the kind of customer service and attention to detail that’s usually associated with a local service provider. “To conduct business successfully at L&S, we must be successful information traders,” says Axel Lorentzen, Chairman, Lorentzen & Stemoco. “Our brokers gather information from their connections around the world. We don’t get paid unless we provide the information that creates business for our clients. If we don’t provide reliable information more quickly than our competitors, we lose business.”
Business Challenges
The nature of Lorentzen & Stemoco’s business poses challenges to optimizing the flow of information among its brokers, and between brokers and their outside contacts and clients. L&S brokers travel constantly, yet must respond to their clients as if they are locally available. “I’m always on the road, but my clients don’t care where I am. They need information to make a decision right now,” says Geir Bakkelund, who works in the sales and purchasing new buildings department, where he is responsible for small tankers. “I know my client is also probably talking to 10 to 15 other brokers, so I need the same access to information on the road as in my office.”
Brokers also need to share their information among themselves, and with outside contacts. Knut Bergmann is a ship broker and an operator with the gas department at Lorentzen & Stemoco. Acting as the link between a cargo owner and a ship owner, he tries to secure the best utilization of the ship owners’ vessels by finding the most profitable cargos. This becomes a highly competitive, last-minute balance that’s struck between an open vessel, based on its position, and the nearest, most lucrative available cargo. “In order to get that information I need to talk with different parties—traders, brokers, charters, owners—and I need to share with them the information that I have—sometimes within seconds,” says Bergmann. “It’s from this information sharing that we form our opinions of the market on a minute-by-minute basis. When we have the best informed opinions, we can guide our clients in best manner.”
Another challenge is the nature of the information itself. A small percentage of information that brokers require is structured customer information: the phone numbers and contact details for clients and the myriad of outside contacts that the brokers use to help garner deals for their clients. However, in this business-to-business environment, most of L&S brokers deal in unstructured customer information, which flows into the company from around the world in huge volumes. Brokers in particularly business departments receive on average 3,000 e-mail messages a day, and they are on the phone constantly. It’s this unstructured information that forms the company's continuous "lifeblood" of client communications, which L&S relies on to nurture its long-term customer relations. The company did not have a single, easily accessible, and searchable place for all brokers and staff to store this data.
“It used to be that a good broker was identified by the amount of unstructured information that he could keep in his head,” says Lars Henrik Ossum, IT Manager at Lorentzen & Stemoco. “With the advent of the Internet and the huge volume of communications that brokers now handle, they need a reliable IT infrastructure to support them.”
Poor Systems Integration Reduced Competitiveness
L&S required an integrated global communication system and customer relationship management solution that would store both structured and unstructured information for all brokers to access, search, and share equally. Ready access to this information would enable them to provide optimum customer service anytime, anywhere.
The company had a third-party system called Strategic, which consisted of a communication system, shipping software, and an address and ship register database. However, this solution did not offer the possibility of global, integrated communications the company envisioned. Going with a single, third-party vendor with a proprietary product narrowed L&S’s options for future development and significantly reduced its ability to adapt to a changing market. “We had to use a technology that wasn’t efficient enough for our purposes,” advises Kjetil Sjuve, Joint Managing Director and Partner at Lorentzen & Stemoco. “L&S needed better integration among our global offices through a direct link to our Microsoft® Exchange Server 2003 [communication and collaboration servers] that were located at headquarters in Oslo.”
Bakkelund agrees. “Before, there was no link between our phone system and our computers. We had to search for and physically dial an 8 or 10-digit number to make a long distance call. This took a long time and often we might get it wrong and have to redial. If we wanted to share some information with a colleague we had to stop and talk to each other over the desk. It’s very difficult to interrupt the phone calls and do that.”
According to Ossum, it was too complex for him and his IT staff of three to integrate the Strategic system with other in-house systems to unlock business information for management to analyze and use it for strategic planning.
“While the tools in Strategic are optimized for the shipping business, it was difficult to get them to work with our business intelligence tools,” Ossum comments. “It was a one-way system: Information could go in, but it was difficult to get it out. Strategic wasn’t delivering enough for us to feel comfortable moving forward. Our brokers were already saying, ‘This company has no intention of developing its system; we need something new.’”
Solution
Lorentzen & Stemoco partnered with Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, Objectware, to help identify an information technology (IT) infrastructure strategy. “Technology is not our specialty, so we needed a company with the IT expertise and a solid reputation for customer service,” says Lorentzen. “We already had a relationship with Objectware: It is a small, dynamic software development company with very skilled programmers.”
Choosing to Standardize
Lorentzen & Stemoco had already deployed Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003 operating system (part of Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software) and Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 for its messaging platform. Windows Server 2003 includes Active Directory® service, which provides a central repository of information about the company’s network, vastly simplifying the management of employees’ access to network resources.
L&S decided to standardize on Microsoft technologies, rather than upgrading its specialty shipping software and trying to integrate into the existing infrastructure, because this approach fulfilled the company’s wish list for a new solution—low risk, low cost, easy to use and maintain, and flexible. L&S had become reliant on its specialized shipbroking solution, increasing the risk for the company should anything happen to that vendor.
Observes Sjuve, “We’ve had very good vendors that disappeared after a few years. We plan to be in business for a long time. It reduces our risk to go with more broadly-accepted technology backed by the support of a partner. Objectware has a close relationship with Microsoft and can deliver the latest innovations to customize our solution to meet our needs. Microsoft products are some of the leading software products in the world today. We trust that they’ll be there to help us in the years to come.”
Building an integrated solution with off-the-shelf products also reduces cost. “L&S wanted standard products because the company didn’t want to spend a lot of money on IT,” advises Morten Dybdahl, Business Manager at Objectware. “Microsoft products have the qualities we need to deliver business value to our mid-sized clients at low cost. We don’t want to charge clients a lot of money to integrate third-party solutions into their environments. Microsoft technologies work together seamlessly. They are customizable, easy to deploy, and require fewer resources to maintain.”
All shipbrokers in Norway have to be International Organization for Standardization (ISO)-certified. For L&S it was important to build an integrated solution flexible enough to accommodate its ISO-specified workflow and business processes. The Microsoft products that Objectware evaluated for L&S are based on XML (extensible markup language), a universal language for data exchange that allows developers to create Web services.
“Standard Microsoft technologies, working together through XML and Web services, allowed Objectware to design an integrated solution that supported our workflow as defined by ISO,” reports Ossum. “That was a huge relief for us.”
Web services are discrete units of software that use XML to connect disparate business systems and communicate across different platforms—and from a variety of mobile devices—to provide the flexibility required to replicate L&S’s existing business processes and to respond quickly to any workflow changes. Using Web services, Objectware can customize and control the delivery of any XML, or Web-based content or service, such as e-mail and calendar functionality, customer management data, shipping news, or market data.
Deploying the Solution
Objectware deployed an integrated suite of Microsoft products that fulfilled all L&S business requirements for a global, stable communication and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. Building on the company’s existing Windows Server 2003, Active Directory, and Exchange Server 2003 infrastructure, Objectware deployed Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003, Microsoft BizTalk® Server 2004, and Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000—all part of the Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software—as well as Microsoft CRM (now part of Microsoft Dynamics™). On the desktop, the company standardized on the Microsoft Windows® XP Professional operating system and Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003.
Objectware designed a solution that would help the brokers manage both structured and unstructured customer information. The solution employs SharePoint Portal Server 2003 to create an intelligent portal that aggregates and stores unstructured customer information in one location, fully accessible to brokers through single sign-on. (See Figure 1.)
Using Windows SharePoint Services, an integral component of Windows Server 2003, L&S can enable brokers and employees to create collaborative sites so that they can better manage customer relationships and information. SharePoint Portal Server 2003 connects these sites to facilitate information sharing and communication across L&S’s global offices. When there is a need for collaboration related to a customer project, employees can easily create team sites within SharePoint Portal Server 2003, where they can access and share customer data allowing them to make faster, more informed decisions and deliver better customer service.
Objectware picked Microsoft CRM to handle customer information like phone numbers and contacts that brokers often need on short notice. Then Objectware used BizTalk Server 2004 and Web services to connect and retrieve shipping and vessel information from a Web-based ship broker solution hosted in Paris. This enables brokers to get up-to-the-minute information about where ships are located.
By using products that are built to work together, including Microsoft CRM, SharePoint Portal Server 2003, BizTalk Server 2004 and Office 2003, and using the benefits of XML and Web Services, Objectware could focus on delivering the best tools for the brokers who interact with the system. “The brokers spend most of their time in Microsoft Office, so this integration provided incredible advantages to L&S,” says Dybdahl. “We could provide the brokers with access to the new integrated communications and CRM solution using their familiar Office 2003 productivity tools—and without significantly changing how they work.”
Objectware employed the Microsoft Office Information Bridge Framework to enable brokers to view and act on business information taken from Microsoft CRM or SharePoint Portal Server 2003. They can access this information from within Microsoft Office Word 2003, Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003 messaging and collaboration client, and Microsoft Office Excel® 2003 spreadsheet software. Brokers simply click on “smart tags,” indicated by a series of little red dots under a word, to open up a task pane full of rich contextual information about a contact, client, or any other data.