MID-SHIP relies on Mazars’ Microsoft solution

Challenge 

MID-SHIP Group LLC is an international shipbroking company and global leader in the transportation of dry cargo and inland logistics. The MID-SHIP Group provides a full range of services covering the entire supply chain, providing its clients with a single management point for their global cargo shipments.

The company is headquartered in Port Washington, N.Y., with group offices in Miami; Belo Horizonte, Brazil; Cartagena, Colombia; Genoa, Italy; Istanbul; Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Seoul, South Korea; and Sydney.

Information about voyages – including shipowners, charterers, clients, laytime information, shipment schedules, freight rates/charges, bills of lading and cargo information – had been tracked in Dynamics AX.

The company required a tailored solution on a current platform that many standard, out-of-the-box ERP and TMS solutions don’t completely cover – such as demurrage scenarios in which a ship is detained by the freighter beyond the time allowed for loading, unloading or sailing.

Solution

Mazars’ Microsoft team implemented a custom solution using Microsoft Dynamics 365 CE (Customer Engagement), Microsoft Dynamics 365 F&O (Finance and Operations), Dual-Write as integration middleware and Power BI for reporting.

D365 CE handles MID-SHIP’s complex voyage management operations (voyages, multiyear contracts, commission tracking, billing and cargo). D365 F&O handles financials (vendor invoice journals, payments to shipowners/brokers, as well as sales orders, invoices and payments from customers). Dual-Write is used for integration between CE and F&O.

Mazars updated MID-SHIP’s legacy system by:

• Decommissioning 17 on-premises servers supporting legacy applications
• Providing the Power BI platform to replace dozens of SSRS reports with modern day dashboards, inquiries and reports
• Creating semiautomated integrations

As soon as cargo is finalized, it’s now sent to D365 F&O as a sales order (SO) for customers as receivables, and as purchase order (PO) invoices for brokers and shipowners as payables.

Results

MID-SHIP is realizing the following benefits from our solution:

• Significantly streamlined workflows, eliminating many legacy manual processes
• Identifying new opportunities with ship owners and charterers
• Enhanced capability to quickly adapt business operations with a flexible and scalable solution

The improvement to finance and accounting workstream procedures via core functionality of D365 F&O reduced the number of financial transactions by 50% due to fewer manual reclassifications.

MID-SHIP’s chartering and operations activities now reside in D365 CE, where workstreams can leverage an integrated experience between CRM and App for Outlook to manage data creation, rates, cargo, vessels and freight services.
As a voyage is completed, freight services and laytime accounting are integrated to D365 F&O as SOs for customer receivables and vendor invoices for commercial liabilities – resulting in a streamlined approach to data initiation through payment finalization.

MID-SHIP has dedicated business processes for each workstream within Dynamics 365 CE and F&O, providing a strong ERP backbone capable of creating operational and financial reports from the data integration within Power BI.
Tracking this volume of information enables MID-SHIP to identify competitive opportunities with shipowners and charterers.

This allows brokers and sales managers to see, in real time, opportunities before other competing brokerage firms do – giving MID-SHIP a competitive advantage and enabling better service to shipowners and charterers.

Another benefit: Brokers and sales managers can track and monitor outcomes of these competitive opportunities, driving accountability and sales key performance indicators.

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