Case Study - Ship Agent

Client Overview

A busy ship agency representing ship owners and charterers at international ports, responsible for managing vessel operations, compliance, and local coordination.

The ship agency bills its customers based on various services provided during the ship's port call. The billing process of a ship agency involves accurately documenting and invoicing for the services provided to vessels during their port calls, followed by timely collection of payments from customers.

Challenges

The client’s operations were heavily paper-based and manually coordinated, making it difficult to:

• Track and bill a wide range of husbandry services.
• Maintain clear records for negotiations, reporting, and client billing.
• Manual processes led to delays, errors, and reduced visibility for both the agency and their shipowner/charterer clients.

Solution

We designed and implemented a billing management application tailored to the client’s unique workflow.

Key features included:

• Capture billing items in a billing register by customer code.
• Retrieve billing items by customer code to generate invoices according to the types of service.
• Use a marking code to mark all invoices related to a port call.
• Create one or more customer payment records for a port call.
• Produce disbursement report by a port call.

Results

• Significant reduction in manual errors and discrepancies across teams.
• Billing reporting time reduced by over 60%, improving business oversight.
• Faster training time for new employees, enabling quicker integration into operations.