An Award-Winning Digital Transformation For A Shipping Specialist

Founded in 1981, MONSON is one of Australia’s most experienced global shipping specialists. From humble beginnings in the Port of Fremantle, Western Australia, MONSON now serves all Australian ports from 30+ locations across Australia and Asia.

MONSON’s legacy SaaS-based solution was aging, unable to scale, and a barrier to enabling competitive advantage. MONSON needed an application modernization overhaul.

Their aim was to build their own end-to-end, in-house shipping agency application from the ground up to replace their current system. By owning the IP instead of leveraging another company’s SaaS product, they would have complete control over the feature set. It also needed to be scalable, support rich system integrations, and provide connectivity. 

The solution Svitla developed is a fully custom-built shipping agency application built on the rich low-code OutSystems platform.  

The approach for MONSON was to automate and streamline processes, use the security, performance, speed to market, and reduced risk of the OutSystems low-code platform, and to apply an intelligent rules engine, automated document generation, and a laytime calculator.  

The result is the MONSON MB2 application. Whether it’s through their customer portal or via their industry-first API, MB2 is a critical integration for many of its customers and service providers, providing valuable insights into the vessels transporting their cargo. 

MONSON’s digital transformation makes it one of the most technologically advanced in its industry.  

The solution has also enabled MONSON to become a force in servicing customers before, during, and beyond the port.  

MB2 incorporates a powerful rules engine as part of its Vessel Port Call Estimator. Due to the clean design and fully configurable back-end, these tariff calculations can now be updated on the fly by admin users rather than programmers, saving time and money and freeing up their own resources.  

With the introduction of MONSON’s long-awaited Multi-Port Estimator within MB2, staff no longer need to create individual vessel estimates in a separate system, and the need for Excel Spreadsheets has been removed altogether. MONSON estimates that its Port Operations staff save approximately 2 hours per day per user on this task specifically – which potentially equates to 140 hours of productivity per day across all its sites.

Shortly after launch, Svitla received the 2022 OutSystems Innovation Award – recognizing its outstanding work in building MONSON’s new end-to-end, in-house shipping agency application.