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Danske Rederier: From a painful file format to a simple CSV upload

Client

Danske Rederier

Industry

Shipping

Services

UX Design

Process optimisation

Development

Ruby on Rails

Heroku

PostgreSQL

The reporting was harder than the numbers in it

Every quarter, the shipping companies had to send a few figures from their payroll systems to Danske Rederier. Even so, they spent blood, sweat and money on it, and several hired external consultants to help.

Danske Rederier is the trade and employers' organisation for Danish shipping, with roots in the 1800s. Among other things, it administers two large funds: a parental leave fund and a fund for further education and skills development. Both run on an equalisation scheme. The companies pay in a small amount per employee every quarter, and can get a larger grant when an employee goes on parental leave or into further education.

That means two reports a quarter from each of the 95 member companies, which together have several hundred thousand employees. And when a company applies for reimbursement, for example because a seafarer is going on parental leave, it has to be quick and easy to decide whether that person is entitled to it. You don't handle that by email.

Shipping is Denmark's largest export industry, and if its 1,800 Danish-controlled ships sailed in one long line, it would stretch 718 kilometres, from Copenhagen to Nuremberg.

80% of the problems came down to the format

Danske Rederier came to us because both payments and applications had become hard to administer. They already had a system, but it had run out of steam. Reporting was done in a format that was, to put it nicely, old-fashioned, and the members in particular found it extremely hard to work with.

The companies couldn't export to it, couldn't proofread the data, and when something went wrong, couldn't see why. Often it ended with a phone call to Danske Rederier, where they opened the file together in a text editor to hunt for the error. Sometimes it was as simple as an Ö in a name.

Blue Denmark in numbers

1,800Danish-controlled ships on the world's oceans
95,000jobs on Danish soil
95member companies reporting every quarter
80%of the problems were caused by the file format

One format every payroll system can deliver

No integration for each ERP system

Every shipping company had to be able to report easily from its own ERP system, and the administrators at Danske Rederier had to be able to process the data without fuss.

We started by looking at which ERP systems the companies used, and whether there was a common denominator in how those systems could export data. An API integration for each system was ruled out. Nor did we want to tie the companies to a setup that limited their freedom to switch ERP.

A simple CSV upload with few clicks

The solution was a simple CSV upload in a clean interface with as few choices and clicks as possible, leaving less room for errors and misunderstandings.

The interface only shows what's needed, such as the status of reports and payout requests. That gives both the shipping companies and Danske Rederier an overview of the whole process.