Ruma Balasubramanian (Google Cloud)
Ocean Network Express (ONE), a global shipping organisation based in Singapore, has partnered with Google Cloud to drive wide-scale digital transformation plans, backed by a trio of specialist partners.
Motivated by a desire to enhance operational efficiency, the business is now running mission-critical SAP systems on Google Cloud alongside rolling out BigQuery and Google Workspace offerings to enhance data analytics and employee collaboration capabilities respectively.
Central to such efforts is Deloitte providing data expertise, DXC Technology integrating SAP workloads on Google Cloud and GoPomelo deploying Google Workspace solutions.
“Modernising our legacy infrastructure requires a strategic rethink of the way internal data is captured and processed at all levels of the company,” said Kosuke Wada, senior vice president of ONE.
Operating as one of the largest container shipping companies globally - handling transactions with 14,000 customers across 63 countries on a daily basis - ONE previously relied on an SAP accounting system hosted locally in each country via a legacy cloud platform.
To modernise systems, the organisation has since migrated to an SAP S/4HANA enterprise resource planning (ERP) finance software hosted on Google Cloud. According to Wada, shifting from on-premises infrastructure to the public cloud provides opportunity to scale ERP systems “up and down” to meet changes in customer demands and data volumes.
ONE is also integrating SAP systems with Google Cloud’s data analytics solutions in a move designed to gain a “unified and real-time view” of data to better predict demand in the supply chain.
“By accelerating the use of data analytics to enhance operational efficiencies, ONE can better meet changes in customer demands and data volumes and make business decisions faster,” Wada added. “Our move to Google Cloud is a realisation of a centralised and intelligent system that allows us to act on trusted and up-to-date information to shape our data cloud strategy.”
Delving deeper, plans to modernise legacy data environments with a data lake using BigQuery are also underway, with the project expected to be completed by the third quarter of 2021.
Specific to collaboration, ONE is already in the process of rolling out Google Workspace to 8,000 employees amid plans to help deliver a “seamless customer service” from any device, strengthening coordination of cargo between ports and countries in the process.
“ONE is a testament to what enterprises can achieve when they embrace the Cloud to modernise and future-proof their business,” said Ruma Balasubramanian, managing director of Southeast Asia at Google Cloud.
“Their digital transformation with Google Cloud will enable them to measurably improve the quality of their decisions, crunch vast quantities of data to achieve unprecedented clarity, and improve employee collaboration in this ever-evolving work environment.”
