Cory Brothers

Cory Brothers Shipping Agency choose Open Text Document Server, Alchemy Edition

Since 1842, Cory Brothers have been serving the Shipping Industry, offering an extensive range of agency services, providing for all the needs of a vessel while in port.

Cory Brothers aims to react quickly to ensure fast and efficient turnaround to ships, which might be carrying oil, chemicals, agricultural products and virtually anything else. By applying this philosophy to their main business areas of Tramp Agency, Liner Agency and General Forwarding and Logistics, plus over 160 years experience, Cory Brothers have established a good worldwide reputation in the shipping industry.

The Problem

Whether they are arranging a berth, pilotage or cargo handling, supplying crew needs, carrying out engineering, maintenance and repairs or overseeing Customs and port authority documentation, large volumes of documents are generated. “There is a huge amount of paper flowing around the world” said Andy Triscott, IT Manager at Cory Brothers. They needed a process to allow Cory offices and agents to scan documents and supplier invoices, which could then be viewed by customers. If a customer wanted to see a document, it needed to be instantly available for viewing, even if they were on the other side of the world.

The Solution

Cory Brothers have developed their own shipping agency management system, ShipTrak, which is built around their Oracle database. ShipTrak is an internetbased application designed to handle all Tramp, Hub and Cruise Agency activities and used by all Cory offices and sub agents appointed by Cory.

Tony Smith at Cory was assigned Project Manager and Developer for the project. Rather then develop their own document management add-on to ShipTrak, Tony decided it was more cost effective to implement the widely used Open Text Document Server, Alchemy Edition system to provide the document storage facilities behind ShipTrak, so approached Avanquest Partner, Document Genetics.

One challenge which needed addressing was the requirement to scan documents at remote sites, many of which did not have a fast network connection. Working closely with Avanquest, Document Genetics developed a remote scan utility. This allows Cory offices to scan batches of documents in disparate locations and submit them over their WAN link to the central Open Text Document Server at Cory’s offices in Felixstowe for publication. The remote scan utility gets around the band width issue by packaging all of the images into one compressed file, then transmitting this automatically via secure FTP.

Before a document is scanned, a barcode label is attached to the document, which contains a unique document reference. This barcode is automatically read by the remote scan utility and once the document is loaded into Document Server, an index is automatically created using this reference. This unique reference is then entered automatically against the document transaction on ShipTrak, which then ties up the image of the document within Document Server to the transaction on ShipTrak. When a customer wants to view a specific document in ShipTrak for one of their vessels, they simply hit a button which drills directly to the document held within Document Server, then they can email, print or simply view it.

The Benefits

“The better we perform as an Agent, the more we have to offer our customers” says Andy Triscott, who goes on to say “ShipTrak gives us the advantage of being able to react in a timely manner to customer queries.”

Many of Cory’s existing customers are already using ShipTrak to view documents on screen and obtain up-to-date information on vessels they are involved with. Customers can also download information from the database into Microsoft Office applications for further analysis on their own systems. ShipTrak has a very simple interface, specifically designed not to confuse users. “Very often there are as few as 3 or 4 menu items available on the screen” says Tony Smith.

Archiving historical documents and data, negating the need for large areas of storage space for paper, for us and our clients is a further advantage, plus we are ahead of the game in being able to meet any new compliance initiatives as they are introduced

ShipTrak has also given Cory Brothers a huge competitive advantage. The integration of Document Server into ShipTrak has added real value to the Cory Brothers Agency systems, giving them uniqueness in the Shipping Agency industry, enabling them to win new business on the back of it.

More information

For information on any of our solutions or products, please call us on 01962 835053 or email sales@avanquest.co.uk.