Chelsea Logistics Charts an Innovative Path: Modernizing Infrastructure and Finance with Cloud-based Systems

Abstract

Since 2016, Chelsea Logistics and Infrastructure Holdings Corp. (Chelsea Logistics) has been doing its part to fuel the country’s economy by contributing to maritime industry growth, as the demand for fast and efficient domestic shipping services continued to increase in the country.

After acquiring various shipping and logistics businesses, Chelsea Logistics saw the need to create digital synergy among its strongest brands by investing time and resources to streamline, standardize, and improve its subsidiaries’ business processes and operations, particularly Trans-Asia, and SuperCat. This move further strengthened Chelsea Logistics’ position as a market leader in the logistics and shipping industry, providing better service to its customers.

As Chelsea Logistics embarked on its digital transformation journey, it partnered with NTT DATA to adopt a Cloud-first policy for hosted workloads, and to apply Cloud adoption framework across its human resources, processes, and applications while ensuring the Team’s expertise to support future finance workloads in the Cloud using SAP S/4HANA on Microsoft Azure.

Challenges

Chelsea Logistics saw the need to transform Trans-Asia’s 15-year-old infrastructure, which was challenged by the rapidly increasing costs required to maintain its legacy systems and aging servers as well as unsustainable time and effort for its lean IT Team, which had to deal with multiple vendors and allocate additional workforce to manage its datacenters in various sites. In addition, the Trans-Asia Team had to do manual interventions in data gathering, such as extracting and consolidating reports from the different groups of companies, which process takes an average of 15 days to complete.

Trans-Asia also decided to replace its liner system software after 10 years of being on-premises to being fully hosted on the Cloud to better support its commercial and equipment management service line of businesses.

On the other hand, the expansion of Chelsea Logistics’ passage business thru the acquisition of SuperCat Fast Ferry in 2019 urged the Group to review and remodel SuperCat’s technological capabilities to replace its legacy systems.

Chelsea Logistics was well aware of the crucial role it plays in providing shipping and logistics services within the country’s archipelagic physical setting. Thus, Chelsea Logistics sought to transform and optimize its processes and operations by migrating its core applications to the Cloud and upgrading its financial system.

Solution

Together with NTT DATA as its chosen partner, Chelsea Logistics started its digital transformation by modernizing Trans-Asia’s and SuperCat’s financial systems – replacing their legacy ERP to a cloud-based ERP that will lead their finance organization to a digital future.

They chose to leverage SAP S/4HANA’s integrated, intelligent features, without the burden of investing in new hardware and maintenance by hosting it on Microsoft Azure, along with its core applications to support the group’s Cloud-first Policy Vision.

NTT DATA developed infrastructure plans for Chelsea Logistics that not only addressed their current SAP system infrastructure requirements, but also optimized the right size resource requirements allowing them to only pay for what it needs and when needed.

“SAP S/4 HANA now allows our Finance team in the Head Office to access real-time financial transactions of our subsidiaries like Trans-Asia and SuperCat. We were able to access advanced analytics resulting in better forecasting. Our Finance team can now work with larger data sets in one system thereby saving hardware and operational costs and time.”
- Rey Phala, Deputy CFO, Chelsea Logistics Holdings Corp.

Through the modernization efforts made with NTT DATA, Chelsea Logistics’ financial system and freight business have seen the following benefits:

• Integrated and streamlined financial processes and increased visibility and transparency
• Improved business insight, financial control and compliance
• Established a unified view of data and processes for a single version of truth
• Eliminated datacenter total cost of ownership and complexity by capitalizing on Microsoft Azure services instead of on-premises infrastructure
• Enhanced the time to market and IT agility to launch new services and applications by automating and accelerating infrastructure provisioning in the cloud
• Upgraded scalability and risk management to support the infrastructure requirements as the business grows in the future
• Improved freight operations consequently enhancing customers’ experience: real-time container movement, quotation management, tracking of shipments, booking of shipments, and e-commerce
• Upskilled Chelsea staff to handle the technical requirements of S/4HANA and functional support and training to the team even during the pandemic.

Value Realization

Chelsea Logistics was able to maximize its existing investments in technology with less complexity and risk, while taking advantage of innovation through NTT DATA’s multi-technology expertise.

They found value and trusted NTT DATA’s strong ability to support their group of companies on both Microsoft and SAP solutions requirements towards its modernization journey. NTT DATA demonstrated a fully managed SAP on Azure hyper-cloud stack of solution, where the solution, delivery, and support components are supported and delivered within NTT DATA.

The move to the Microsoft Azure platform for Chelsea Logistics’ SAP and non-SAP systems became a guaranteed success through the collaborative and consultative approach that NTT DATA employed – demystifying and separating fact from hype around hyperscale cloud solutions.

Working very closely and aligning their strategy with Microsoft team proved to be a key component in winning against competition. This is valuable to Chelsea Logistics as it removed all the possible complications of going to other partner solutions, which has joint venture partner-to-partner agreements where service level agreements would be potentially impacted.

“The support NTT DATA extended to us was beyond our expectations. They handled all technical and functional requirements. Even with the pandemic, they readily flew to Cebu for actual deployment with our local team and offered support through training. They were able to assist us in upskilling our members to make the transition to S/4HANA a success, which was one of the best decisions we made. Thanks to NTT DATA. We are more empowered to expedite our plans and integrations in the future.”
- Efren Bernardino Jr., Senior IT Manager, Chelsea Logistics Holdings Corp.

“Technology is an indispensable part of our business model. Without technology, our lives and operations would not have been simpler and faster. We are grateful to NTT DATA for making our digital transformation possible, taking customer experience and employee efficiency to the next level. Beyond these technological upgrades for our freighter business and internal financial system, we look forward to streamlining all processes of the holdings company, Chelsea Logistics, and its subsidiaries to eliminate redundancies and ensure optimal resource utilization.”
- Chryss Damuy, President & CEO, Chelsea Logistics Holdings Corp.

Chelsea Logistics’ partnership with NTT DATA, a trusted global innovator, has become more relevant as the technological landscape changes day by day. With or without the pandemic, technology modernization is a necessity. As customers demand innovation and innovation breeds business, Chelsea Logistics is committed to harnessing the power of digitalization to allow employees, customers, and other stakeholders enjoy the benefits that technology can bring.

Chelsea Logistics and Infrastructure Holdings Corp.

Chelsea Logistics is the publicly-listed shipping and logistics arm of the Udenna Corporation. It is a corporation organized and registered with the Philippine Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on August 26, 2016, primarily to act as a holding company operating through its wholly owned subsidiaries: Chelsea Shipping Corp.,Trans-Asia Shipping Lines, Incorporated, Worklink Services,Inc., Starlite Ferries, Inc., TASLI Services, Incorporated, and The SuperCat Fast Ferry Corporation.

Chelsea Logistics has been expanding the breadth of its services, covering charter, passage, freight, cargo, tugboat services, logistics services, ship management and crewing.

About NTT DATA

NTT DATA – a part of NTT Group – is a trusted global innovator of IT and business services headquartered in Tokyo. NTT DATA enables clients, as well as society, to move confidently into the digital future. We are committed to our clients’ long-term success and combine global reach with local client attention to serve them in over 50 countries.

NTT DATA is one of the world’s most successful SAP system integrators while Microsoft develops world leading cloud and data platforms. Our strategic partnerships with both allow us to provide end to end services and an ecosystem to drive digital transformation through cloud, ERP and Data platform modernization, user experience, mobility, AI and ML and robotics and more.

Media Contact:

Hannah Christine Vera Cruz

ndph.marketing@nttdata.com