At the British Antarctic Survey with support from out partner company Cohesive have just rollout the first phase of our Maximo based Cargo Management system to streamline our Antarctic Research Station resupply.
As an organisation we have looked at ways we could use Maximo to reduce workload and improve accuracy of our resupply processes. With the introduction of the Cargo Management system, we have combined all the usual Inventory and Purchasing modules flow with a custom cargo consolidation and manifesting applications to give us the ability to delivery inventory resupply without data having to be retyped data into alternative systems or spreadsheets.
During the first week of rolling out the cargo system, our Supply Chain Logistics Team were able to remove 7 spreadsheets from the Cargo consolidation process alone, on top of this the time taken to pack and document packages was reduced significantly.
Although our development may not be cutting edge compared to large supply chains using AI, having the custom apps to cover each stage of our bespoke resupply processes will not only make us more efficient but is also a step change in data accuracy, something that is vital given the limited accessibility we have to our polar research stations.
The key aims of the system development was to make all aspects of the logistics process intuitive and transparent as possible. Traditionally vessel manifests where produced in excel and passed to the ships crew just before cargo operations, with the Maximo cargo system the crew are able to see all manifest data as its created allowing time to plan for all upcoming cargo operations and develop load plans prior to arrival in port saving time alongside.