CASE STUDY
Transportation & Logistics
Maritime Intelligence
Achieving operational excellence in the age of AI.
A Seismic Shift
It is estimated that AI will boost overall productivity in transportation & logistics by 40% over the next decade. However, with great opportunity comes greater competition and unforeseen technical challenges.
Our client is a North American maritime shipping company with a strong presence in the US Southeast and Northeast. The company was recently acquired by a Singaporean shipping giant, creating challenges with integrating data and institutional knowledge across entities. In addition, the organization faced rising costs and declining shipping volumes following the Covid-19 recovery, compounded by mounting industry competition and persistent inflation.
With so much at stake, our client enlisted Astral Insights as a trusted partner to design and implement an Azure-based AI & analytics platform to drive operational excellence and profitability.
An Integrated Solution
We began by working with executive leadership to establish a common set of desired business outcomes, laying the foundation to develop a roadmap for deploying an integrated AI & analytics platform powered by Microsoft Fabric.
Our deployment began by designing architecture to deliver insights to support decision making in key areas: vessel management, sales, logistics, and finance. Our solution needed to support the automated ingestion, harmonization, and transformation of data from a multitude of sources, including ERP, TMS, CRM, Excel, and 3rd party shipping market data. To this end, we deployed functional prototypes in 2-week sprint phases to deliver value fast.
With an understanding of the causal relationships between actions (e.g., renegotiate a contract) and business outcomes (e.g., improve vessel profitability), client leadership pinpointed the insights they needed to ensure decisions were made with more certainty, wisdom, and efficiency. This garnered early trust in the information presented, earning buy-in from key stakeholders.
Over the next 12 months, we continued adding features to support the workflows of over 100 employees. With personalized information delivered through intuitive tools, our engagement generated substantial returns on the initial investment.
A Lasting Impact
In the first 12 months of our engagement with the Client, we generated a 270% return on investment through reduced fuel and ocean costs and an optimized “price to win” contract pricing approach.
The cloud-based solution unlocked a one-stop-shop for data-driven insights to fuel more efficient operations and profitable strategic decision making across the organization.
Our client continues to work with us as a partner to maintain and improve their data & AI infrastructure, now looking to develop a cutting-edge contract management application with generative AI-enabled conversational insights and recommendations.
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