World's Largest Shipping Management/Services Company provide a unified access to enterprises services using intranet/internet portals.

Vgroup: Company Profile

V.Group is a leading maritime outsourcing group of companies. It has increased the range of ship management and related services offered to shipping, leisure and offshore industries and expanded its network of offices.

V.Group's primary customers are ship and other assets owners who deploy their assets worldwide. These assets include tankers, bulk carriers, gas carriers, chemical tankers, FSOs/FPSOs, container ships, cruise ships, ferries and super yachts.

V.Group has expanded its operations primarily through organic growth. A few of its selected acquisitions are BGI in 1999, Acomarit in 2001, Martinoli in 2004, UMC in 2005, RC Consultants in 2006 and ITM in 2009.The Group is owned by over 100 management shareholders and, in March 2007, Exponent Private Equity has invested in V.Group's equity.

Business Challenge

The service portfolio of V Group comprises several services. However, their core services are Ship Management, Leisure and Manpower services. The challenge was to provide a unified platform for all the information related to V.Group's portfolio of services via one Enterprise Internet Portal. The portal should give a single platform for publishing all service related information and will also give V.Group a Uniform look and feel throughout the enterprise in line with their brand image and corporate culture.

The Enterprise portal would also pave the path to services integration on one platform, which would mean higher collaboration between different services throughout the enterprise and also be a definitive edge for the business over its competition.

Solution

Vignette 7 was chosen as the WCM (Web Content Management) platform for this implementation, keeping in mind the unique capabilities provided by Vignette in this area. The staged delivery of content provides a non intrusive way to separate the management.htmlect of content from delivery.htmlect of content, which in turn pays out as 99% uptime for web site.

With Vignette's capability to integrate with a company's internal directory access to the content is highly secure and controlled access at a coarse and fine grain can be achieved throughout the Enterprise.

Vignette Portal 7 was chosen as the Enterprise portal Server for providing unified access to information within the enterprise via the Internet/Intranet.

Dynamic Portal module provides a seamless way to integrate Vignette portal with Vignette WCM platform and provides re-usable components/services that can be shared across the Enterprise with portal services.

Globrin provided the technical know-how in the form of Architecture and Design of Content Types, Sites and Channel Structures, Workflows for Content publishing so that right content could get to the right place at the right time.

On the portal front, a wide-range of Portlbean/JSR 168/286 portlets were developed which enhance the re-usability of components immensely. With integrated search facility using Autonomy at its heart, the content can be searched and presented to the user in various formats.

Key Benefits

With this solution in place the following benefits are obtained:

• A Unified Platform for access to up-to-the-date information about the Group and its services.
• A common place for all their clients and partners to interact with.

Implementation of an Enterprise portal has opened doors to many opportunities which are part of future plans:

• Access to Group's services which were earlier distributed into separate sites and locations.
• Increased collaboration among various departments for day-to-day business activities
• Achieving a uniform brand-image across the enterprise.