Advanced Marine
Advanced Marine Pte Ltd is South-east Asia’s leading supplier for quality commercial diving, survey, ROV and subsea equipment. They provide end-to-end services such as consultation, PVHO and dive system engineering, sales, rental and support.
Using: SAP Business One
>99% Inventory Management Accuracy
High Customer Satisfaction
0 Bad Debts from System Inefficiencies
The Problem
- POs created separately on Excel instead of legacy system
- More time spent than necessary on data entry, reconciliation, and manual tasks
- Invoicing was slow and sometimes inaccurate, slowing down cash flow processes and making AR management tedious
- Lack of inventory visibility and tracking meant reduced ability to meet customer demands quickly
The Goal
- Speed up AR processes to improve financial accountability
- Spend less labour and time resources on creating reports
- Reduce manual work and hard copies production
- Improve inventory reporting and tracking accuracy
- Reduce bad debt and outstanding rental payments that were caused by systemic inefficiencies
- Better visibility and real-time accessibility to data, to improve customer response times
Advanced Marine is a veteran presence in the marine & equipment rental business. With over four decades of experience in the region, the company has built up a notable reputation and customer base that includes major international offshore diving contractors and numerous projects under LTA and PUB in Singapore.
Faced with growing uncertainties in the industry (e.g. unstable oil market performances), Advanced Marine knew they had to improve their internal efficiencies. Areas they looked at included:
- Replacing their outdated financial system and PO tracking via Excel with a modern, real-time ERP system to boost data accuracy and reduce tedious manual work
- Streamlining reporting by reducing resources needed and doing away with unnecessary data siloes e.g. using Excel to run their POs separately
- Improving inventory tracking in real-time to anticipate and respond to customers confidently, using data-backed decisions
- Managing their accounts receivables more efficiently to improve cash flow and outstanding rental & maintenance payments collection
"We're involved in vessels, where we top up their spares and systems when needed. A lot of 'fortune-telling' is involved in anticipating what kind of work is out there, and where our customers are," says John Zwiers, Commercial Manager. "The better informed we are, the better we can anticipate this."
In 2014, Advanced Marine chose AFON IT to deploy SAP Business One, which they liked very much for its real-time financials and inventory functionalities, rental maintenance capabilities, and user-friendly interface.
With SAP, Advanced Marine can now track every transaction of rental and services, as well as goods — their inventory accuracy had improved from 80% to over 99%. They're also able to manage their financials and quotations in real-time and across devices.
By consolidating their processes in a systematic way, they could optimise their workflow. This improved their responsiveness speed and timeliness to customers.
"SAP Business One has helped us tremendously. Now with all the data in our system, we can tell how much spare inventory we have and which is in demand. We can also easily track their movements in a report, which strongly helps us in deciding what and how many to order," says John.
He also adds that he's very contented with AFON IT's SAP support helpdesk.
"AFON IT doesn’t walk away from problems... If you've issues with something, you know you can contact them and their SAP helpdesk will respond back quickly, even if they're busy," says John. "They've been a great help."
“AFON doesn’t walk away from problems. They'll stand by your side to get it resolved..If you've issues with something, you know you can contact them and their SAP helpdesk will respond back quickly, even if they're busy.”
Grow with SAP Business One
With SAP Business One, Advanced Marine improved their financials and inventory efficiencies, as well as rental maintenance management for an increased competitive edge.
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