Seaway Marine Transport Will Use Lawson Applications to Help Support Growth, Improve Resource Management and Enhance Reporting Capabilities
ST. PAUL, Minn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 14, 2006--Seaway Marine Transport selected Lawson Software's (Nasdaq:LWSN - News) Financials, Human Resources, Procurement and Business Intelligence suites to help improve the efficiency and effectiveness of its core operations. The Ontario-based shipping company also will use Lawson's products to help enhance data-sharing between its geographically distributed offices, fleet and customers. Seaway Marine Transport licensed the applications in Lawson's second quarter of fiscal 2006, which ended Nov. 30, 2005.
Managing the largest fleet operating on the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River system, Seaway Marine Transport controls more than 35 vessels. These ships carry a variety of specialty commodities, such as iron ore and coal for steel producers, aggregate products and gypsum for the construction and road-building industry, salt for road safety and commercial uses, coal for electric power generation, and potash and grain for the agricultural industry.
In 2004, Algoma Central Corporation and Upper Lakes Group Inc. combined their respective marketing, operating, finance and information technology departments into Seaway Marine Transport. As a result, Seaway Marine Transport needed to consolidate three sets of legacy business systems to help ensure timely access to enterprise-wide data. Seaway Marine Transport embarked on a strategic planning initiative to address this goal, starting with the creation of a cross-departmental committee to identify the business needs and goals of the company.
"By taking this holistic approach to studying our business processes and information systems, we observed that they are interrelated and are not functionally isolated to individual departments even though each department has responsibility for specific data within the company," said Seaway Marine Transport Director of Information Services John Brenton.
Based on its internal review process, Seaway Marine Transport evaluated several enterprise software solutions and ultimately chose Lawson as the foundation for its unified information system. The consolidated Lawson system will provide Seaway Marine Transport with automated workflows for many core business processes, enabling managers to respond more quickly to the demands of customers, employees, regulators and other stakeholders. For example, by using Lawson's Web-based portal, authorized Seaway Marine users can access data that can be tailored to their needs. "This will allow us to respond quickly to changing business requirements and capitalize on new opportunities," said Brenton.
The Lawson products will enable Seaway Marine Transport to focus on financial strategy and analysis, and help reduce inventory costs, improve data-sharing and expedite its hiring processes. Moreover, the applications will allow Seaway Marine Transport to drill into documents, such as spreadsheets, and other unstructured data, which can help reduce the time employees spend manually entering, validating, storing and retrieving data.
"As service organizations expand through acquisitions or organic growth, as Seaway Marine Transport has, they need a flexible, scalable enterprise business IT foundation to drive measurable business process improvements," said Vicki Griffith, industry marketing director - Industry Markets, Lawson Software. "We have a proven record of delivering the software and services our customers need to achieve their business objectives at the lowest total cost of ownership."