Online Ship Agent

Online Ship Agent — web-application for the ship agent company developed on the C-Gator base with additional modules.

Customer: INFLOT World Wide Inc.
General contractor: Gold Taurus

Situation

American Ship Agent Company provides service for cruise liners and cargo ships in harbors all over the world. It represents interests of several US cruise companies providing services in 19 harbors in the CIS market. The company's staff receives and handles clients' requests for a particular service in a harbor. With that, the company is in charge of supplying operating information to clients about the state of their accounts, schedule of ships calls to harbors and services rendered.

To increase the operations efficiency and reliability concerning ship calls and accounts payable, the company has decided to introduce an automated control system for the tasks and ships calls historyю Key objects:

• To reduce correspondence processing time
• To systematize the information about company's clients: their ships, cooperation history, personal accounts status
• To speed up the process of ship calls review and answers preparing
• To set control performance discipline of the company staff
• To provide clients with urgent delivery of information
• To optimize general reports preparing

Solution

After general estimation, Business Software and Gold Taurus consulting company developed a decision-taking strategy. The specialists of both companies designed and implemented the system based on the C-Gator software within 2.5 months. The directories system containing all base information about clients, ships, harbors, moorings and company services considerably speeds up the staff working process by reduction of time necessary for information search. The “enter once; use many” technique allows to sharply reduce mistakes and information losses. We significantly optimized the process of scheduling ships arrival to harbors. The company tabled schedules in Excel before. Now the company uses a special application integrated with C-Gator. The application supports the “drag and drop” function that considerably facilitates scheduling. The schedule is uploaded to the system and automatically published on the website of the company.

Scheduling     scale up the image

Benefits:

• Reduction of ship calls processing time
• Control of tasks dates and quality of services performed by ship calls managers
• Services costs automatic calculation and billing. Payment monitoring
• Decrease of paper work volume
• The website essentially reduces clients query flow. A client has an access to a wide spectrum of the information via a personal website section closed for outside users
• Reduction of routine procedures time (scheduling, financial analysis, information search about a client).

Architecture

Online Ship Agent is a multi-tire ASP.NET application created on the basis of the C-Gator software: web-projects management.

Key capabilities:

Corporate web-site management Dynamic website management (CMS) Client personal area SSL support Mailing Attendance statistics Audit trail  Rights and roles system	Web-site management scale up the image
Task management  Tree of stored queries to the list of tasks, division by parameters and access rights Preview of task contents via web interface Automatic tasks uploading from the post server Page display and filtering of the tasks list Data export / import in XML format	Integration with e-mail   scale up the image
Ship calls management General reports on calls and service payments in HTML and XLS format, reports on debtors and periods Tabling and publishing call-based schedule of ships arrival Multicurrency call-based system for client's personal accounts Semi-automatic generation of accounts payable by calls and directories, dynamic creation of accounts templates Simultaneous calls account for many ports, ships space and information division by ports A separate Windows-application with the graphic editor to schedule ships arrival; integrating application and C-Gator via web service Page display and filtering of the calls list Data export / import in XML format	Accounts payable generation   scale up the image
System of directories Directories dynamic design (specifying fields and forms of directory displaying) Data export / import in XML format

Development technologies and tools:

• ASP.NET
• VB.NET
• MSSQL
• XML
• MS SQL Server 2000
• C#
• Web-service

Project realization stages / Project participants.

Start: November, 2004
Project duration: 10 weeks

Projects participants:

• System analyst — 1
• Project Manager — 1
• Programmers — 4
• Designer — 1
• Tester — 1

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