Global Maritime cuts IT spending and increases efficiency across 18 countries

Global Maritime delivers offshore consulting services all over the world. In 2019, the company standardirized on NetSuite. It provided the basis for streamlining and digitalization. Now, Global Maritime is ready to utilize artificial intelligence, with Antire's help, to further increase its competitiveness.

After acquisitions, growth, and expansion, Global Maritime had around 30 business systems in use in different countries and business areas. To streamline the business and increase competitiveness in tougher times in the offshore industry, Global Maritime chose to standardize on Oracle NetSuite.

A common ERP system for five different departments across 18 countries has given Global Maritime several advantages:

• Reduced manual processes and work tasks.
• Always up-to-date with financial status across countries and business areas.
• A complete picture of the financial status of the entire business.
• Avoiding time-consuming and complex compilations of spreadsheets.
• Easier to implement measures to improve processes and quality in projects.
• Streamlined the organization, which can spend more time on value-creating work instead of administration.

Innovative consultancy for marine environments

Global Maritime is an engineering company specializing in offshore and marine projects. The company was established in 1979 and has grown geographically and in terms of people. Today, 350 employees deliver projects worldwide. The company has offices in 18 countries, from Australia in the east to Houston in the US in the west. Keywords for the deliveries are innovation, practical experience, high quality, and safety.

The sea is the common denominator for everything Global Maritime does. Brigg describes Global Maritime as: "a technical consultancy with sea spray."

Global Maritime delivers projects and services within four industries: aquaculture, oil and gas, renewable energy, and shipping. The company handles projects from start to finish, from engineering and design, construction, and third-party verification to dynamic positioning, installation, risk management, and decommissioning.

A small and efficient organization based on NetSuite

After several years of strong growth through acquisitions and organically, Global Maritime had around 30 business systems. Each country chose its own system from the outside, which was popular in the individual country. In addition, various business areas also had their own systems.

The result was a fragmented ERP setup, which presented several challenges:

• Getting a comprehensive and comprehensive overview of the financial situation of the entire company and across the business areas was time-consuming.
• It was resource- and time-consuming to maintain and update the systems.
• It was difficult to get streamlined and automated processes.
• IT costs were unnecessarily high.

Some ERP systems Global Maritime used worked across countries, while other business systems only handled tasks in one country. As Global Maritime grew, it became clear that the entire business had to be brought together in one common ERP system. The choice fell on NetSuite, a complete and true cloud solution.

Christian Brigg underlines, “With one common ERP platform, we always have up-to-date insight into the financial status of the entire company and various areas. We no longer depend on spreadsheets from different countries and service areas being sent to us. Getting data packages in different formats from 18 countries and then manually compiling them doesn't work.”

NetSuite handles finance, projects, HR, and administration

Global Maritime started the migration to NetSuite in 2018. It was a demanding task, but after a slightly bumpy start, the NetSuite platform was gradually optimized and supported Global Maritime's business better and better.

Antire joined as a partner in 2019 and has assisted with optimizing the NetSuite platform, automating, setting up best practices, and further developing the ERP solution with new functions and solutions.

Brigg says, “We chose Antire because we depend on having external partners with deep technical expertise in NetSuite, who also have industry expertise. This helps us use NetSuite optimally, making us better than our competitors. We also need a partner who can advise us on new services, like artificial intelligence (AI).”

Global Maritime also uses other partners, for example, to implement and configure modules that handle specific geographical needs, such as electronic invoice module for the Middle East.

Increased competitiveness, continuous quality improvement, and lower IT costs

Today, Global Maritime uses NetSuite as a project management tool and financial system. NetSuite handles all financial processes with the exception of payroll and travel bills. A number of administrative processes and parts of the HR function also run through NetSuite.

Standardization on NetSuite has provided Global Maritime with a number of benefits. The biggest advantage is that everyone has the same, up-to-date information and insight throughout the company and into all projects – regardless of where they are located or which business unit they belong to.

Another advantage is that Global Maritime's small administration becomes more efficient as a result of standardization and automated processes. This means that Global Maritime can use more resources on value-creating work for customers and less on internal, manual tasks.

A third advantage of Global Maritime as a global organization is that it is easier for people to contribute to various projects regardless of location.

Brigg says, ”NetSuite has also made it easier to follow up and ensure the quality of our projects. We can compare different projects across locations and business areas and improve constantly.”

AI for efficiency and improvement

Antire helps Global Maritime with continuous improvement of how NetSuite is used, as well as updates and implementation of new solutions. Now, the company is considering how AI can be used to improve efficiency.

Global Maritime wants to adopt both generic AI solutions such as Microsoft Copilot and utilize AI in NetSuite specially adapted to Global Maritime's business and needs. Antire and Global Maritime have started work to look at how AI agents can be used to professionalize and automate processes to a greater extent.

Brigg concludes, “We are always looking to make things better. Among other things, we investigate how the Account Payable (AP) processes can be automated using AI. And what can we further automate in NetSuite with AI.”