Faced with rapid growth, marine lubricants supplier Gulf Marine, discovered the hard way that the manual integration workflows they had come to rely on, was holding their operations back from scaling. Lean teams and fragmented legacy systems exacerbated the matter.
Joey Chua, Gulf Marine’s director of digital and IT transformation recalled, “Before I joined the company, the way forward was simply to hire more and overcompensate for operational gaps. But that wasn’t sustainable for a global company serving shipping communities around the world.”
At that time, newly minted CEO David Price, had assessed the situation and issued a digitalisation directive “Project Orchestrate” which Joey was tasked to execute. The story of this project’s success is well-documented in the industry and culminated in Gulf Marine receiving an award last year that recognised its massive achievement – streamlined operations with more seamless collaboration, enhanced customer and employee experience, as well as cost savings of up to SGD800,000.
But more important than that, is the foundation Project Orchestrate had created for the organisation to keep building collaboration, convenience and optimisation across its different functions like HR, IT, supply chain, and customer service.
Discovery before automation
The transformation was not only about replacing a legacy ERP system, but enhancing value at every customer interaction. In this regard, their partnership with Workato, an advanced integration-as-a-service (iPaaS) had faciliated the required integration, orchestration and automation of complex end-to-end workflows.
When asked about how Workato works with its customers, Workato’s SVP and APAC GM, June Lee, had said,”We spend a lot of time throughout the entire cycle of working alongside our client. And I think we spend the most time trying to understand each other and also the real pain points of the business.
“Sometimes people tell you the symptoms of the problem and not the real root cause of the issue. So you have to do a proper discovery to understand where’s the pain, what is worth automating and what’s not worth automating.”
EITN had caught up with June and Joey at the sidelines of Workato’s flagship customer conference, World of Workato, or WoW, and Joey shared. “Earlier this year, Workato and Gulf Marine embarked on the next phase; now we are building agentic AI within Gulf Marine.”
He also talked about the organisation’s vision to build an MI6-type of central orchestrator that would coordinate other functional AI agents. The idea is for seamless automation across departments without the need for manual follow ups.
The idea is to enable more self-help, a valuable capability that is possible thanks to Workato’s low-code/no-code platform that allows business users and other non-technical users to automate workflows without relying on IT. Joey found this capabiliy appealing because it meant that business analysts could translate their business understanding directly into automated solutions.
AI, mission-critical apps, and moving targets
Joey also recounted his experience at earlier keynotes where a CIO who shall remain unnamed had candidly shared, “Over my dead body before I’d let AI integrate with my core ERP system!”
But, this is what Gulf Marine enabled and reaped cost-efficiency benefits from, after implementing the necessary strong governance layers into the workflow.
Workato’s integration enabled Gulf Marine to directly ingest structured and unstructured customer data – emails, attachments, text, images – into SAP systems with remarkable accuracy. It is this kind of innovation and automation that sees Gulf Marine continue to “punch above their weight” and achieve record revenues year-on-year, without raising headcount.
If a customer requests a product, our system can now recommend an alternative from our global inventory – optimising warehouse usage and improving financial outcomes.
Joey Chua
Project Orchestrate had transformed previously convoluted internal processes and the increased visibility and collaboration freed operational leaders up to reimagine what is finally possible.
Joey recounted a global workshop that unleashed new solutions, with cross-functional teams innovating fresh approaches for slow-moving goods and automated customer service allocations.
Other innovations included a recommender system for slow-moving stock. “If a customer requests a product, our system can now recommend an alternative from our global inventory – optimising warehouse usage and improving financial outcomes,” Joey explained. Another use case saw sanction checks for vessels being automated, saving precious risk assessment time with accuracy and speed, while ensuring compliance to ever-evolving regulations.
In spite of all the advancements that orchestration and AI technology was facilitating for the organisation, it was refreshing to hear Gulf Marine restraining from using technology for everything, It had resisted the temptation to fully automate customer touchpoints and instead leveraged automation to reassign customer queries to available representatives. This ensured a high-touch experience even during staff absences. “We can automate everything,” Joey concluded, “but we choose not to lose the human touch.”
