Gulf Marine is an established marine lubricant supplier to the global shipping industry, supplying marine lubricants and services in more than 1000 ports across 80 countries. With branches around the world to support global operations, Gulf Marine is recognised for customer-centricity and technical excellence.
Customer Story
Efficiency & Personal Touch: How Gulf Marine Gains an Edge with Workato
By partnering with Workato, we are now able to securely and scalably deliver on pressing priorities and future-proof our tech stack while reaping phenomenal time and cost savings - more than 2100 hours per month, translating into cost savings of almost US$800,000 per year.
Challenges
- IT bottlenecks
- Complex manual processes
- Time-consuming and unreliable planning
Rapid growth in the highly dynamic marine services industry presented new challenges. Gulf Marine’s CEO, David Price, sought to empower their global teams to scalably handle the pace of growth, maintain a personal touch with customers, and enhance employee experience. He hence partnered with Gulf Marine’s technology team, led by Joey Chua, to set out a roadmap to modernize their tech stack, migrate their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, and increase agility and efficiency.
First, they were facing bottlenecks because IT in Asia supports employees globally. This means that a salesperson in Europe who gets “stuck” using their ERP may have to wait several hours or even another day for IT to come online to attend to them.
Second, Gulf Marine’s complex processes were costing them. For instance, their reps work on over 1000 pricing quotations a week, and each used to take around 40 min manually. This involves cumbersome steps like importing business-critical data from their complex ERP, toggling between Excel sheets and other solutions.
Third, it was not sustainable for Gulf Marine to continue doing their essential planning manually. For instance, planning the transport of barges is a highly dynamic and manual process and so is the updating of contract price lists with product prices.
Solutions
- Self-service MSTeams Bot
- Auto-update barge planning
- Automated pricing tool
Gulf Marine chose Workato because of the platform’s ease of use, ability to quickly deliver the impact they needed, and excellent customer service.
Built in just two days, the implementation of a Microsoft Teams Workbot was a quick win that enables Gulf Marine’s business users to resolve “stuck’ ERP sessions as a self-service, eliminating IT bottlenecks while enhancing user experience. Today, Gulf Marine’s global ERP users no longer need to hop between applications or wait on IT to come online in a different time zone.
Similarly, automating the highly dynamic and manual barge planning process ensures timely access to critical data, resulting in significant time and cost savings.
However, the star of the show was Gulf Marine’s Pricing Tool automation.
Workato seamlessly integrated disparate platforms to dramatically streamline the pricing quotation process.
Impact
- Quotations done 30% faster, saving 530 hours each month, or over US$200,000 per year
- Automated barge planning saves US$40,000 per year by doing away with 80 hours of work per month
- Increased agility and enhanced employee experience
Automating the pricing quotation process not only increased efficiency by 30%, saving over 530 hours monthly across 20 sales reps, but also translated to substantial cost savings - over US$200,000 annually. The impact is being extended further with plans to automate product price updates, potentially saving an additional US$540,000 per year.
Similarly, automating the barge planning process saves Gulf Marine US$40,000 per year by doing away with 80 hours of work per month.
Overall, self-service chatbots and streamlined processes have increased agility and enhanced the overall employee experience for Gulf Marine’s talented workforce.
In less than a year, the collaboration between Gulf Marine and Workato has not only addressed pressing priorities but has also positioned the company for sustained success in a competitive industry.