Cmotions and Delegate team up to help logistics group Eimskip

Facing a rapidly growing mountain of data, logistics provider Eimskip set out to develop a strategy for the management of its data. The Iceland-headquartered group reached out to Cmotions and Delegate for guidance.

With revenues of over €800 million, Eimskip is one of Europe’s larger Eimskip companies specialised in freight forwarding services for frozen and chilled commodities. The group, founded in 1914, operates with around 50 offices in 20+ countries across four continents.

As part of its ambition to become a more data driven organisation, Eimskip worked with Broad Horizon subsidiaries Cmotions and Delegate to develop a data strategy and then bring this strategy to life.

The journey kicked off with a strategy development phase, which saw the consultants first assess the current data strategy and supporting capabilities within the organisation.

“Using our Data Strategy framework, we co-developed a vision and growth path for maturing Eimskip’s capabilities in order to become a data driven organisation,” recalled Stijn Kuijpers, Managing Consultant at Cmotions.

The partners then teamed up to conduct a data maturity assessment. This was done across four drivers – people, organisation, processes, and technology – as well as the five areas of expertise: data strategy, automation, analytics, business intelligence, and data management.

“The assessment provided insights for the current state of the organisation and what steps needed to be taken to realise the data strategy,” said Kuijpers.

One of the key learnings which was drawn out of the analysis was that Eimskip certainly did not struggle with finding sufficient amounts of data. To the contrary, the company had so much data available that the true challenge was translating all this data into valuable insights. And then using those insights to drive more effective decision-making.

“The analysis helped us acknowledge that we did not need to find more data but we should focus more on producing the data that was really needed by the business,” said Hilmar Karlsson, CIO at Eimskip.

The strategy phase also helped Eimskip understand that becoming truly data-driven hinges on more than just data and technology. Karlsson: “Simply replacing old tech with new tech is not enough. This journey requires new ways of working with data and a data-driven mindset for both the IT organisation as well as for the business who applies the data.”

From strategy to action

With a blueprint in place, Eimskip took several steps focused on improving its maturity. This included: initiatives to modernise the IT infrastructure, adopt a new cloud-based technology in the area of data science, and developing a number of proof of concepts. Meanwhile, key stakeholders from the business were informed on the value of using data, and ambassadors were lined up to support initiatives within their domain.

Using a score card, Eimskip can keep track of the progress that is booked across the data maturity model, and one level down, each of the initiatives under the data journey umbrella.

“We’re happy with the support we received from Cmotions and Delegate. They helped us develop the right plan and use cases for succeeding in our data journey,” said Karlsson, who oversees the execution phase going forward.