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| Maritime services company
Elcome International is aiming to keep its customers’
vessels on track and in touch with the deployment of Microsoft
Business Solutions Great Plains. Al Futtaim Technologies
has deployed the solution, to provide Elcome with better
management of its service engineers, better communications
with partners and customers and more efficient management
of its business. |
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The
Microsoft Great Plains solution will help Dubai-based Elcome,
which sells and services navigation and communications equipment
for ships, to manage a wide range of activities as the company
expands its operations in the Gulf region. The company has
offices across the Middle East, Africa and India, and the
new application will optimize their strategic business processes
across these geographies, as well as manage its Dhs 20 million
inventory.
“Many companies in the maritime industry are slow to change,
but we knew we had to have greater efficiency in our business
to enable us to manage our growth,” said Jimmy K. Grewal,
IT & Security Manager, Elcome International. “We started
looking at our financial data, but then realized we could
integrate many more parts of our operations than that, to
give us greater transparency of processes, greater control
and much better ability to meet our customers’ needs.”
The project includes the first complete roll out of Great
Plains Field Services in the region, a module of Great Plains
designed specifically to manage engineers and other staff
that work away from the company’s offices. Elcome’s engineers,
often have to undertake repair work while ships are still
at sea. This creates a need not just for a powerful human
resources planning solution to manage the engineering team,
but also a need for a highly mobile solution too.
“When something goes wrong with a ship’s communication or
navigation systems, the ship can be delayed if the problem
isn’t fixed, so we fly engineers out to meet the vessel, and
they need to know what spare parts are required, when they
will be available and so on. It is very important that we
are able to meet the window to get things fixed; providing
our engineer and the customer with the right information is
essential in getting the task done properly and on time –
our success is based on service,” Grewal said.
The deployment is also unique as Elcome is hosting the Great
Plains application with service provider ASP Gulf, and making
the application available to branch offices through Citrix
and the web, via Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server and Business
Portal. The company decided to outsource hosting of the application
so that it did not have to worry about investing in infrastructure
for its various offices, and so that it would have the flexibility
to move to Dubai’s proposed Maritime City, which should be
completed in two years time.
Venkat Raghavan- Divisional Manager of Al Futtaim Technologies
said: “By deploying Great Plains over Citrix and the web,
we were able to provide Elcome with a highly flexible solution
that will fit with the needs of its mobile workforce. This
solution also allows Elcome to better manage the cost of expansion
at the desktop level, as staff can access the application
with just a thin client device, instead of a full PC. When
you add the highly integrated functionality of Great Plains,
you end up with a solution that is not only quick and cost
effective to deploy, but also provides a very high degree
of functionality for end users.”
“The Great Plains solution will allow Elcome to significantly
cut the amount of time it takes to respond to its customers,
which is essential in a business such as maritime communications,
where lives could be at risk if work is not carried out promptly,”
said Joe Devassy, SMS&P manager, Microsoft Corporation.
“There is also plenty of functionality in Great Plains for
Elcome to expand the solution into new applications, such
as integration with customer and supplier systems to provide
quicker and better management of relationships, and the capability
to access the solution via handheld devices such as Pocket
PC or smart phones, an important consideration for field service
engineers,” Devassy added.
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