Eastern Pacific Shipping navigates new territory with Oracle
The shipping company implements Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP and Oracle Cloud EPM to manage increasingly complex financial and reporting requirements.
“Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP provides us a single source of truth across our revenue recognition, payables, and asset management process. This reduces the use of offline databases, updating of spreadsheets, and the chances of human error when it comes to financial reporting.”
Business challenges
With a history spanning 60 years, Eastern Pacific Shipping is an industry-leading ship management company headquartered in Singapore. The company’s 5,000-strong global workforce manages over 180 container ships, dry bulk, and tanker vessels. Eastern Pacific is fully integrated with in-house commercial, legal, technical, operations, IT, and finance departments.
Previously, the company relied on a legacy IT system for accounting and Excel spreadsheets for reporting. But as the company entered new business segments and increased its fleet size over the last few years, it experienced rapid growth that led to increased financial and accounting complexity. With more than 190 legal entities to manage globally, creating a “single source of truth” became critical. The company wanted a cloud-based solution to integrate its revenue recognition, accounts payable, and assets management process. It was also looking for a solution to help it ensure adherence with global compliance regulations.
Having both Oracle ERP and EPM simultaneously ensures standardized and automated business processes, driving business excellence. This cutting-edge software helped transform and streamline our business, but more importantly, it has empowered our teams to operate to their full potential and achieve a better work-life balance.
Why Eastern Pacific Shipping Chose Oracle
Oracle’s vast experience in implementing enterprise resource planning (ERP) and enterprise performance management (EPM) systems for companies in the maritime industry was a key reason why the shipping company decided to implement Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP for accounting and Oracle Fusion Cloud EPM for financial reporting. The fact that Oracle could provide an integrated, end-to-end solution was another driving factor.
Results
Using Oracle technology, Eastern Pacific Shipping has evolved its finance function from basic transaction processing to robust reporting and analysis. Improvements include faster reporting, less reformatting of data into reports, elimination of “source data” worksheets, and creation of financial dashboards. The company also now has a standard chart of accounts that provides insight into financial analysis and management reporting.
Oracle Cloud ERP also integrates with the company’s operational systems, eliminating manual touchpoints such as invoice management, budgeting, and planning. That makes Oracle Cloud ERP a single source of truth to provide visibility and control over projects, budgets, and costs companywide. Integrations with banks have streamlined and automated payment processing and bank reconciliation processes.
The change also enabled Eastern Pacific to standardize processes across its Singapore and UK operations, which ensures consistency in recording financial transactions and reporting financial results, while automated management reports and financial statements have increased user productivity.
The company is also benefiting from enhanced financial controls and compliance via systematic approval workflows, budgetary controls, and segregated duty via risk management.
Partners
Oracle Consulting helped Eastern Pacific Shipping standardize finance processes, implement them in Oracle Cloud ERP, and roll out integrations to an in-house procurement system, maritime operations system, crew management system, and banks.