Full steam ahead for South Port
Velox delivers accuracy, efficiency and accountability gains to help an NZX listed company do business better.
South Port is New Zealand’s southernmost commercial shipping port, and proudly Southland’s only NZX listed company. The port employs 134 full time equivalent staff, and handles over 3.4 million tonnes of import and export cargo each year, operating around the clock.
The company uses Microsoft Business Central as its ‘central source of truth’, and recently implemented a new Harbour Management System to track vessel movements and manage resources. Risk and Technology Manager Jason Jones says a key part of South Port’s digital strategy is to integrate the data from stand-alone systems and make better use of that data. But integrating their two main business systems wasn’t straightforward.
“We had two third party providers, but we were quite restrained with the bespoke APIs which came with their systems. We needed to do more with the information,” says Jason.
Faced with the choice of relying on third parties to develop and then manage custom API integrations, or upskilling their team and making the resource available to do that in house, Jason says: “Neither of those were good options for us.”
That’s when another project manager they were working with recommended they contact Velox, to see how the two systems could be integrated in a way that worked for them. It was a challenging integration, but as South Port’s Financial Accountant Sarah Smith says, “It wasn’t a challenge for us!”
“It was that ease of dealing with a single person who was able to navigate the issues at those bespoke third party APIs that we really got benefit from,” Jason adds.
Now with Velox acting as the middleware, South Port’s key systems are fully integrated, and they have complete control over how the integration works.
“Velox integrates those remote data sources into the central repository,” says Jason, “and we don’t need those technical skills to be able to manage the data integration between systems of different levels of maturity and functionality.”
As a result of the seamless systems integration they now enjoy, Sarah says they’ve increased efficiency in their operations, and have improved visibility over their data flows.
“We were doubling up on so many things, entering everything into old legacy systems, printing everything out and re-entering it all into our finance system,” Sarah explains. “Integrating has made the whole process much more efficient, and for audit purposes, we can see our data streams start to finish. It’s definitely improved accountability.”
With his strong focus on risk management, Jason was quick to pinpoint the benefit of removing what he calls “fat finger issues” too.
“We’re removing one of the mistake steps. Now data gets entered once, that’s confirmed, and it’s passed straight through to the source of truth in Business Central. So we’re removing the complexities of keystroke errors.”
Sarah says there were unexpected benefits of working with Velox too, thanks to the support team’s extensive knowledge of business systems and technology.
“The Velox team were able to fix some issues that we had with Business Central, which wasn’t part of the brief,” says Sarah. “I find them very solution focused. They highlighted things we could do better or could make things easier for us, which was definitely an added bonus.”
“They added value by asking the question ‘why’,” says Jason. “They got us to think about how we were doing things, to help us do business better.”
Both Sarah and Jason agree they’ve been very satisfied with Velox, and would happily recommend the platform. Now they’re on board with a flexible integration solution and have their systems ship shape, it’s full steam ahead for this successful Southland business.
