As 2023 came to its end, let's reflect on the journey we shared last year. It's been a year filled with innovation, new milestones, and most importantly, strengthened partnerships with our valued clients. Let's take a moment to see the highlights of this year!
Customer Success Stories
We're excited to see that implementing Closelink in daily procurement operations is bringing tangible benefits to our clients. Here are just three of many inspiring stories showcasing the remarkable success of our users!
Lifting data analysis leads to 120.000 USD saving potential
Closelink helped to identify an important cost-saving opportunity in the course of a customized lifting analysis performed for one of our clients. The analysis of aggregated liftings over a six-month period revealed that the client could shift and concentrate a large portion of the fleet’s demand toward a more favorable supply location. This insight had the estimated potential of creating savings of up to USD 120.000.
Improved stock monitoring reduces costly emergency orders
The implementation of ROB Warning Limits, a recent capability of Closelink, has quickly resulted in significant benefits for our client Zeaborn Ship Management. Following the feature’s introduction, Zeaborn’s procurement team identified a number of vessels within their fleet that had at least one grade below the company’s expected standard stock levels. A challenge that we have encountered with many of our customers and prospects. Zeaborn reached out to the respective vessels and made sure that the stocks would be refilled at the earliest viable option. Surely a feature to help avoid excessive costs associated with product shortages and unexpected liftings.
15% cost savings on a single marine lubricants order
Our client OKEE Maritime has been using Closelink for many years already. Just recently, while benchmarking contractual terms against market offers in real-time, they were able to identify a great one-off opportunity. While for OKEE Maritime smooth operations always come first, this 15% savings opportunity didn’t go unnoticed!
Innovative new features
Closelink has been recognized as one of the top 50 most innovative SMEs in the maritime industry (access full report: here). And it's for a good reason! This year we introduced a suite of innovative, category-specific features designed to elevate your procurement experience. ⤵️
Thanks to the new REACH functionality you know exactly how many sailing days your vessel has left and where to best lift any product needed well in advance. No more rush orders or deliveries in suboptimal ports; pro-actively choose your best alternative available within sailing distance!
Our new Warning Limits notification helps you to quickly react in case a stock falls below your defined minimum safety limit. Monitor compliance with internal policies and enhance transparency with these real-time alerts. Continue to improve your insights into stock performance against predefined limits.
With the Better Port Option feature, you can be sure not to miss out on any good opportunity available among your contracts and your vessel's itinerary. During the ordering process, this feature highlights to the purchaser any better opportunity available based on the inquiry raised by your vessel.
Going global
Following the continuous growth of our operations in Europe, we have started to focus on our expansion into Asia in 2023. Establishing a long-term presence in Singapore as a major maritime hub has been our clearly defined objective. Within our first year of presence in Singapore, we welcomed leading companies like BW LPG and Eagle Bulk as our clients. At the same time, we were able to strengthen relations with local maritime institutions (such as the MPA), while actively participating in multiple regional events including IMPA Singapore, OSJ Conference, Gastech, and more. We are very thankful to have been recognized as a valued member of the Singaporean maritime scene.
With a growing client base across different regions, our commitment remains to stay closely connected with our partners and to deliver the service that Closelink stands for.
For further details, reach out to our regional representatives:
- Europe/Greece: Philippe Lavarde (philippe@closelink.com)
- Asia/Singapore: Aneesh Thankappan (aneesh@closelink.com)
What's next? A glimpse into 2024
In 2024, you can expect even more! We'll be focusing on:
Consumption monitoring, demand forecasting & process automation
This year we have introduced our REACH feature, a helpful indication of the remaining sailing days based on the daily average consumption of a product, reported ROBs and vessel schedules. In 2024, we deep-dive into the matter of automated data cleansing and extended sense checks to generate most accurate consumption figures and demand forecasts among individual vessels, but also entire fleets. At the same time, we will continue adding more market, port and supplier-specific information onto the platform to help our customers match demand and supply even further. All of this will be another important step towards demand prediction and process automation.
P.S. As we continue working on new capabilities and integrations, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn for sneak peeks, announcements and more updates waiting for you on Closelink!
