Integrated oil, gas and chemical company OMV employs innovative tech for managing its marine supply

Leading global maritime supply chain innovator Voyager Portal (Voyager) announced today OMV Supply & Trading UK (OMV S&T) as the latest client to implement the Voyager Portal Platform. OMV S&T is a subsidiary of OMV Group, one of Austria’s largest listed industrial companies. Voyager will be at the centre of OMV S&T’s strategic push to use best-of-breed technology to bring digitalisation to its global supply chain, underlining OMV’s position as a market innovator. Voyager’s workflow automation and visibility solution will bring material savings, as identified by OMV S&T.

Voyager provides the foundation layer for the physical trading lifecycle, allowing OMV’s Supply & Trading department to capture valuable trade and voyage information whilst automating processes. This intelligent use of advanced technology enables OMV to be proactive in its decision-making using real-time data, historical trends and analysis. Voyager’s offering provides a significant advance in voyage management and visibility, process automation, and data collaboration, which are at the core of OMV’s digital initiatives.

Some of Voyager’s key benefits include:

● Flexibility to rapidly adjust and expand business process workflows within the Portal to match the client’s ongoing needs, in as little as 30 minutes.
● Continuous improvement and best-in-class workflows, creating optimised digital replicas of manual processes, while streamlining and improving these processes.
● Improved productivity, including the reduction of emails and elimination of siloed data in emails and spreadsheets, resulting in hours of saved management time.
● Enabling inspectors, agents, ship captains, ship owners, and others, to collaborate directly on the Portal.

With the initial implementation completed in just 3 months, OMV S&T’s goal is to use Voyager Portal as a central resource for all the voyage and cargo activity within the company, with considerations to expand access to the platform throughout the OMV Supply & Trading department, from beyond the voyage and cargo operations team, to trading, chartering, claims, finance, accounting and management.

Matthew Costello, CEO of Voyager Portal, said: “It’s great to see a further, really strong customer validation of our approach through OMV's adoption and understanding of our vision and the potential of the Portal. OMV S&T recognised early on that maritime and trading operations don’t just touch one department, but the entire company, so having one source of truth used seamlessly across the entire enterprise, while improving data capture and process visibility, is the future of managing trading and shipping. The value added by having OMV as a partner, who are devoting considerable resources in time and knowledge to configure and shape the platform for the oil trading activity, has truly exceeded all expectations.”

He added: “Voyager is very different in having a workflow which can be used across the enterprise, instead of numerous, disjointed applications, creating effective operations, which reach beyond the operations and chartering teams. We firmly believe in collaboration, so our platform is designed to complement industry software, such as ETRMs, to provide the best solution to the client.”

Voyager’s platform goes beyond simple management of the maritime supply chain, capturing data in a central location and providing businesses with the ability to analyse this data. Its ability to seamlessly integrate with other applications is important, especially as industry players begin to move from monolithic software solutions to a nimbler approach.