Synchrologic Data Synchronization Software Helps Maersk Rule the Waves

Back in 1904, Captain Peter Moller didn't have to worry about tracking cargo or managing data-he just wanted to make sure that the goods showed up on time. But 95 years after Moller and his son, Arnold Peter Moller, founded the Maersk Line shipping company, things aren't nearly as simple.

The Challenge-Upcoming Industry Deregulation

In those early days, the Mollers sailed a single ship between Denmark and the Far East. Today, Maersk is the general agent for the A.P. Moller Group in North America and its fleet of 120 vessels calls on 6,000 ports in over 35 countries. Competition is intense, keeping profit margins razor thin.

That unforgiving business environment will soon get even tougher, as U.S. shipping rates are scheduled to be deregulated beginning later in 1999. Amid such upheaval, any advantage can be vital. Maersk figures to gain substantial efficiencies through better information management.

For Maersk, information -- as a tool to save money and time -- has become critical to the success of their business. Maersk must track each container on every vessel, so the information needs are vast. The company also must determine the most profitable mix of cargo on each ship and ensure that ships are not sailing with too much empty space. Moreover, Maersk must guarantee that the cargo space demands of its best customers are regularly met, even on short notice.

The Solution: GAMP (Global Account-based Marketing Plan)

All of these tasks require speedy, widespread access to a mountain of data about the loads on ships and the particular shipping needs of individual customers. Both at the corporate and field level, having access to detailed customer data is key to the future success of Maersk's business.

To that end, Maersk over the past two years has implemented GAMP (Global Account-Based Marketing Plan), an expansive database application that contains customer data used for logistical planning, customer service and decision support. GAMP maintains more than 10 million records in a Microsoft SQL Server database. Moreover, it allows both Maersk employees in their New Jersey headquarters and their nationwide field reps to have access to the same up-to-the minute information.

GAMP allows Maersk to track, in real time, how much cargo each customer is shipping, where it is going, the mix of cargo and the rates being paid by each customer and on each container. With this information in hand, Maersk field reps can do a better job of ensuring that ships don't sail with empty space, that cargo from important customers is not turned away and that business forecasts are as accurate as possible. This is a competitive advantage for Maersk and helps increase the productivity of their field reps.

Some 400 users, about half of them mobile sales people employing laptops, tap into GAMP and update data constantly. Given that GAMP has over 10 million records, it is quite an accomplishment for Maersk to be able to put this amount of information in the hands of their field reps in a manageable and up to date format. Now instead of 1-2 MB of local data, the reps now have between 20-100MB of data in their laptops with which to do their analysis and reporting. Better decisions are being made locally, and as a result, customers are being better serviced.

"A key part of our overall strategy is developing more dialogue with customers," explains Jeffrey H. Ivinski, Maersk's general manager of sales and marketing processes. When field reps go to meet with their customers, they can carry the latest information with them on their laptops and answer customers' questions on the spot. In short, this kind of information access gives Maersk's sales reps an enormous competitive advantage in the field.

The Benefits: Reduced Communication Costs

At the root of GAMP's effectiveness is the fact that all Maersk's users, at corporate and in the field, are working with the same projections. In other words, the data is synchronized. Instead of corporate periodically preparing and sending static reports to the field, now all users work with all the data they need to do their job. The Synchrologic software ensures that the data on the mobile PC databases matches data in the centralized GAMP system.

"After using GAMP for a while, we saw that data synchronization was a problem and, therefore, knew we had to come up with a different syncing tool," Ivinski says. "That's where Synchrologic came in. The bottom line is GAMP would not be the effective tool it is today without Synchrologic. It has made GAMP extremely efficient, and it has enabled us to achieve, from a systems perspective, what we definitely want to achieve: distributing large quantities of accurate, up-to-date data throughout the organization, even to mobile users.

Most important, Synchrologic's data synchronization software has helped Maersk slash by 95 percent (from $300,000 to about $14,000) the annual costs in telephone-line connections needed to transmit data among its users throughout the Far East and North America. What is more, data is being uniformly updated throughout the Maersk network of some 400 users in less than 15 minutes.

Such updates from the field need to be communicated to the home office and re-distributed to all the relevant field users. Data collisions must be managed, data reliability must be maintained, and communication times must be short. With updates being made daily by some 200 mobile laptop users, the data-synchronization system needs to accept, process and distribute up to several hundred million operations between these databases throughout the business day. Synchrologic data synchronization handles the task smoothly.

The Benefits-Offline Syncing

Best of all, Synchrologic's store-and-forward syncing software works when Maersk's users are offline. When computers are idle, the Synchrologic software "syncs up," updating data across Maersk's sprawling network. So when users turn on their machines, they get current, accurate data.

"I don't think you'll ever find another data synchronization methodology that works offline this effectively, and can truly get you on and off line in one to three minutes a day," says Jared E. Daum, director of account development at Broden, a Mountain Lakes, N.J. consulting firm that has helped Maersk design and implement GAMP.

Maersk, Broden and Synchrologic worked in concert to make synchronization as transparent as possible to Maersk's users. They call it "stealth sync." If a user walks away from his computer for a half-hour, the Synchrologic software begins synchronizing data after a couple minutes. The user, thus, does not have to initiate the syncing process, and when the user starts using GAMP, the most up-to-date data is there. "Synchrologic syncing software has allowed us to be disconnected while the syncing takes place," Ivinski says. "That's a real key to the system. We can go out there and actually talk with our customers, show them the program we have. Though it was not originally designed to be a selling tool, the system has definitely become one now."

The Benefits-Better Communication & Better Customer Service

Maersk's old system of compiling shipping forecasts was slow and cumbersome, and produced "astronomical" communication costs for shipping data, Ivinski recalls. Just as important, data was often lost in a sea of confusion. Sales reps would send data to the main server while the main server was sending something back to the rep's laptop database, so the data was never really in sync, he says. "There were all these changes that were going around and around and around," Ivinski explains. "Changes were never applied to the server, or just disappeared. That was a huge concern because all of a sudden, we have no idea where we are in the sync process and where we have to go."

When data was lost because of a lack of synchronization, the entire forecasting process essentially collapsed. Instead of having projections complete two weeks before the start of a quarter - Maersk's goal - reps and managers would still be scrambling to finish projections well into the quarter. Projections would eventually get done, but the process was draining resources - both man-hours and telephone costs for shipping data.

Maersk's old method of compiling projections often went adrift from the start, and created ripples of inefficiency along the way. Field sales representatives would manually plow through projections and reports "line by line by line by line, for every single customer," Ivinski says, "which can literally take forever."

After the sales rep finished with the data, he'd send it to a sales coordinator, who would re-input data to the master Excel spreadsheet and send that to the corporate offices. Corporate staff would then comb through the records and clean them up.

That tidal wave of inefficiency was problematic. Maersk, Ivinski says, does not want the corporate staff, removed as it is, to control the process. Rather, the company wants the regional managers, who are closer to the sales reps' work, to have the first look at reports and make adjustments and set deadlines. It's difficult and impractical for a trade manager, overseeing 12 offices, to manage individual customer accounts. On the other hand, managers of the individual offices should have a much better handle on specific accounts.

"We knew the process was not as dynamic as it needed to be," Ivinski says. "Unfortunately, it would take such a long period of time that you'd have to almost project a quarter out for the following quarter. So you were really projecting two quarters ahead. In our industry, not every customer knows that far out what they'll need. With Synchrologic's data synchronization built-in to our application, Maersk is much more responsive to our customers' needs."

The Benefits-A Supportive Partner

The GAMP application, with its large data requirements and complex distribution model, wasn't a lightweight project, and through the inevitable development challenges, officials at Maersk, Broden and Synchrologic established a good partnership.

"Synchrologic really listened to our unique needs, and they responded as a genuine partner," Ivinski says.
Once a Maersk employee, Daum was part of the team charged with finding a data synchronization solution that would be crucial to the success of GAMP. Broden was already assisting Maersk. In building GAMP, Broden and Maersk wanted to use industry standard software development tools, and plug in a data synchronization solution. Broden's president, Donald L. Culbertson, Jr., knew of Synchrologic. So, the Broden-Maersk team investigated.

Broden/Maersk became a Synchrologic beta tester, and worked with the software maker during its development. "Still," Daum says, "there's nothing on the market, as far as I can tell, that comes close to Synchrologic."

In his view, five features distinguish Synchrologic software from other synchronization packages:

1. Heterogeneous database replication makes switching databases easy. Maersk, for instance, replicates data between its central Microsoft SQL Server database and the Access databases on users' laptops.

>2. It is based on the ODBC standard, allowing developers latitude to write applications that are largely independent of the synchronization process.

3. Rules-based information sharing has enabled the Maersk/Broden development team to define how information is distributed and which users receive which information.

4. The ability to synchronize data offline while computers are idle streamlines the entire operation of GAMP, Daum says. "The replication process has been designed to be completely transparent to the end users. Furthermore, server-side preprocessing eliminates the load on the server during heavy usage in mornings and evenings."

5. Having a transport independent delivery allows for flexible means of delivery. "Most companies already have email or some other file transport mechanism in place, so they can use their existing infrastructure which reduces implementation and administration costs."

With any new remote technology, IS managers and staff need time to master system administration. That's especially true in a company such as Maersk, which has historically relied on mainframe-based information systems, Daum says.

Not only is GAMP client/server-based, as opposed to mainframe-based, but it also includes mobile databases that must be synchronized, adding an extra level of complexity. If, say, a user in the field experiences an error, it's harder to diagnose and fix than a problem on a mainframe or client/server machine in an office. But Synchrologic is flexible enough to allow developers to centrally remedy problems in their organizations. That is crucial, because Maersk's users are not computer experts, and don't need to be. æ
The Competitive Advantage

Faced with an increasingly competitive global market and the dynamics of industry deregulation, Maersk has had to find ways to be more competitive. Maersk believes that having better access to detailed and current information will give them that advantage over other players in the industry.

"We believe that our investment in GAMP and Synchrologic was a smart decision. The project will have a return on investment (ROI) over the next three years of almost 1500% and a payback of 7 months. In our industry, those kinds of results are a real achievement," says Ivinski.