Speed Logistics Marine

Scaling a global fleet without scaling the administrative load that usually grows with it.

Europe

99.99%

Uptime for global maritime operations

90%

Automation of payments and invoicing

50%

Reduction in month-end close time

40%

Increase in task management velocity

2 hrs

Reclaimed daily per team member

Dashboard interface on a laptop showing task list with statuses, priorities, and assignees, alongside a smartphone screen displaying the Baltic Dry Index graph with data for different ship types and years.

#Maritime

#ERP

#SaaS

#Mobile

#.NET

#AWS

#PostgreSQL

#Logistics

Summary

Speed Logistics Marine operates in an industry that moves roughly 80% of global trade — and that still runs much of its administrative work on tools designed for a smaller, slower era. SLM reached the point where the constraint on growth was no longer the fleet; it was the volume of administrative work that fleet generated. Disconnected systems for vessel tracking, multi-currency accounting, and manual correspondence had accumulated into a backlog the team couldn't outrun by hiring. The brief was a unified digital core — a single ERP ecosystem that could absorb the administrative load, centralise global operations, and let the business grow the fleet without growing the back office at the same rate. We delivered that core: a modular ERP integrating nine business functions, deployed on a high-availability production infrastructure, paired with a cross-platform mobile application for teams operating outside the office.

Request

The mandate was specific: an enterprise resource planning system and companion mobile application that would:

Automate logistics workflows and eliminate manual data entry across vessel operations

Synchronise complex international accounting and invoicing across multiple currencies

Provide port-side access for teams operating outside the traditional office

Create a single source of truth for vessel lifecycle management — lease history, ownership, payments, contracts

What made this harder than the standard "build an ERP" framing is that it had to operate at production scale from day one. Maritime operations don't pause for cutover weekends.

Challenge

Three pressures shaped the engagement.

Correspondence overload.

Thousands of business-critical documents and emails required manual sorting and routing. Each delay in the information lifecycle compounded into delays in operational decisions — and in maritime operations, those decisions are time-bounded by tides, port windows, and crew schedules.

Documentation gaps.

Fragmented records for vessel lease histories and ownership weren't just an inconvenience — they were regulatory exposure. A missed contract lapse or an unverified ownership detail could affect operating licences in specific jurisdictions.

Operational silos.

Accounting, HR, and fleet management each ran on disparate systems. Cross-cutting questions ("what does this voyage actually cost us, including crew and finance overhead?") required manual reconciliation across at least three tools. Real-time accountability was effectively impossible.

The growth ceiling these three created wasn't a fleet capacity problem. It was an information architecture problem.

Feature scope

The solution was delivered as nine integrated modules:

Task and workflow management

with asset-linked notifications

Centralised vessel management

lease history, ownership, payments

Multi-currency financial engine

automated invoicing, vendor payments, cash flow tracking

AI-powered mail indexing

that automatically routes high-volume external correspondence to specific vessels and contracts

Personnel and HR module

with global activity tracking

Crew competency module

with multimedia proficiency testing

Integrated calendar and secure file database

for payment and event tracking

Cross-platform mobile application

for remote operations

Predictive logistics module

with AI-driven route optimisation

Tech stack

Application:

.NET 9 / ASP.NET Core, an open-source web development framework | .NET Core 9 (backend), Next.js + TypeScript (web frontend)

Mobile:

Cross-platform mobile application

Database:

PostgreSQL with PostGIS for geospatial queries; strict ACID guarantees and EU data residency

Infrastructure:

AWS Multi-AZ deployment for high availability, Terraform for infrastructure-as-code

CI/CD:

Jenkins pipelines with security and quality gates

Design:

High-fidelity interaction prototyping in Figma; enterprise dark UI

QA:

Manual QA on isolated staging and production smokes, Postman and Swagger for API contract tests

Key Features

Vessel lifecycle hub

A single-page view of every vessel's history — lease terms, current contracts, historical payments, ownership documentation — all accessible instantly without cross-system navigation. The architectural value isn't the dashboard; it's that for the first time, the vessel record is one record, not a federation of five. Lease liability decreases because the team can see expiry dates without hunting for them. Contract lapses become visible early rather than at audit.

Laptop screen displaying a vessels management dashboard with lists of actual vessels and not linked cargos, showing vessel names, contract details, managers, and options to move vessels or link cargos.

Multi-currency financial engine

International maritime finance is structurally complex: vendors invoice in their local currency, settlements happen in a third, accounting consolidates in a fourth, regulatory reporting requires a fifth. The financial engine handles multi-currency invoicing and vendor payments end-to-end, with reconciliation built into the core rather than added as a quarterly exercise. Duplicate invoices — historically a meaningful source of capital loss — dropped by up to 90%. The financial close cycle accelerated substantially.

Mobile phone and laptop showing payments and cash flow list screens with dates, amounts, and payment status in a finance application interface.

AI-powered mail indexing

The single highest-leverage feature for daily operations. The platform ingests external correspondence at volume and automatically maps each message to the relevant vessel and contract. The mailbox stops being a queue of unsorted items and becomes a structured view organised around the assets the business cares about. This is what generated the "2 hours reclaimed daily per team member" outcome — not by working faster, but by removing the routing step entirely.

Predictive logistics

AI-driven route optimisation that turns voyage planning from a reactive task into a structured decision. The engine analyses maritime data patterns to generate fuel-efficient routes and precise ETAs — fuel consumption reductions of up to 20% are within range for routes the engine has enough history on. This module is the newest addition to the platform and continues to evolve as it accumulates voyage data.

Dashboard interface displaying vessel location on a world map with region filters and vessel details in a table.

Timeline

Month 1

Discovery

Domain modelling, project mind map, prioritised backlog.

Months 2–7

Core engineering

Backend development of vessel lifecycle hub and financial engine.

Months 8–9

Data migration

Aggregation and cleansing of legacy data from existing systems.

Months 10–11

UAT and performance hardening

User acceptance testing and security auditing.

Month 12

Go-live and stabilisation

User adoption training and transition to high-availability production.

Results

Summary

The headline outcome: SLM can now grow its fleet without proportionally growing its back office. The administrative load that previously scaled linearly with fleet size now scales much more slowly.

Results in numbers (detailed)

90%

automation of voyage payments and invoicing, recovering capital previously lost to manual accounting errors

50%

reduction in month-end close time, giving leadership real-time financial visibility

30–40%

reduction in administrative workload per employee through automated scheduling and reporting

40%

increase in project velocity via the asset-linked workflow engine

2 hours

reclaimed daily per team member by removing the correspondence routing bottleneck

99.99%

infrastructure uptime for zero-downtime maritime operations

F. A. Q.

What is included in the development scope?

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How do you estimate timelines?

Timelines are based on the approved scope, project complexity, dependencies, and the client’s feedback speed. Estimates assume timely input and approvals from the client side.Delays in feedback, changing priorities, or new requirements may directly impact delivery dates and are handled transparently.

How many revisions are included?

Who is responsible for communication and approvals?

What happens after delivery?

Next steps

The platform is in continuous evolution. The current roadmap includes:

Fleet-wide IoT — integrating real-time vessel sensor data into the lifecycle hub for predictive maintenance and reduction of unplanned downtime

Automated regulatory compliance — a smart-contract layer to verify and generate regional maritime documentation, further reducing exposure to contract lapses and port delays

F. A. Q.

What was the most impactful single feature in this engagement?

The AI-powered mail indexing module. Operationally, the financial engine and vessel lifecycle hub generated the larger headline numbers (90% automation, 50% faster close), but in daily work the mail indexing changed the most. It removed the routing step from an inbound correspondence flow that was consuming roughly two hours per person per day. The architectural lesson — that the highest-leverage automation isn't always in the obvious places — applied directly here.

How long does it take to migrate legacy maritime data to a new digital core?

For SLM, the data migration phase ran approximately two months (months 8–9 of a 12-month engagement). That timeline reflects the complexity of consolidating vessel lease histories, ownership records, and financial data from multiple legacy systems with inconsistent structure. Projects with cleaner source data or narrower scope land faster; engagements with significant data-quality remediation can run longer.

Why .NET and PostgreSQL for this engagement?

The stack choices followed the constraints. .NET 9 / ASP.NET Core, an open-source web development framework | .NET Core 9 aligned with the team's existing expertise and gave us the type safety and performance profile maritime workloads require. PostgreSQL with PostGIS supports both strict ACID guarantees for financial data and the geospatial queries needed for vessel tracking — without splitting the data layer across two systems. The choices weren't fashion-driven; they were workload-driven.

How does a mobile app for port-side teams change the operational model?

It removes the assumption that operational decisions have to wait for someone to get back to the office. Port-side teams can update vessel status, approve documents, and access the single source of truth from the terminal. For an industry where decisions are bounded by tide and port windows, removing the office round-trip is significant.

How does a digital core address the "administrative burnout" pattern in shipping?

By absorbing the routing, reconciliation, and reporting work that previously fell to people. Fragmented records and correspondence silos are replaced with automated task management and asset-linked notifications. The team can manage a larger fleet without proportionally growing administrative headcount — which is the part of maritime growth that historically caps scale.

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