OPTIMA – Streamlining Maritime Group Procurement

Introduction

Maritime procurement organisations sit at the intersection of a complex web of relationships — ship managers, suppliers, surveyors, and internal commercial, accounts, and compliance teams, each with different workflows, different data, and different responsibilities. Managing that complexity manually is slow, error-prone, and difficult to audit at scale.

OPTIMA, also known as the Gen-Pro Tool, is a web-based procurement and accounts automation platform developed by Exelia for GenPro, a maritime procurement organisation serving major ship management companies including Columbia Shipmanagement and Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement. This case study explores how OPTIMA transformed the way GenPro manages supplier relationships, financial reconciliation, and regulatory compliance — replacing fragmented manual processes with a single, governed, intelligent platform.

The Challenge

GenPro operates as a centralised procurement organisation on behalf of multiple ship management members, managing a large and growing network of suppliers across ports and product categories. Before OPTIMA, this operation relied on a combination of manual processes, email-based communications, and spreadsheet-driven reconciliation.

The consequences were predictable: supplier onboarding was inconsistent, agreement management was fragmented, financial reconciliation between members and suppliers required significant manual effort and was prone to error, and compliance events — such as certificate expirations and agreement anniversaries — were tracked informally and occasionally missed. As the volume and complexity of procurement activity grew, the limitations of this approach became increasingly unsustainable.

GenPro needed a platform purpose-built for the operational realities of maritime group procurement — one that could enforce consistent processes, automate financial workflows, and give every department exactly the access and visibility they needed.

The Solution

Exelia developed OPTIMA as a comprehensive procurement and accounts automation platform, built from the ground up around the specific workflows of GenPro’s operation. Rather than adapting a generic procurement tool, Exelia embedded into GenPro’s commercial, accounts, and compliance functions to understand precisely how the business worked — and engineered a system that reflected that reality.

The platform centralises the full supplier lifecycle, from initial vetting and onboarding through to agreement management, financial reconciliation, invoice generation, and compliance monitoring. A department-based permissions matrix ensures that each team — Commercial, Accounts, Compliance — operates within a defined functional scope, maintaining data integrity while giving every user the tools relevant to their role.

A particularly significant architectural decision was the one-to-many agreement feature, which links multiple supplier applications to a single agreement. This reflects the commercial reality of how maritime procurement relationships are structured, and eliminates the duplication that would otherwise arise from managing each supplier application independently.

Features and Benefits

Supplier & Member Management OPTIMA centralises the full supplier lifecycle — evaluation, vetting, and onboarding — through a standardised process that ensures every supplier is assessed consistently before approval. Member entities and their office information are managed within the same system, giving GenPro a single, reliable record of both its supply base and its member network.

One-to-Many Agreements Management The platform facilitates the creation and oversight of supplier agreements through a one-to-many architecture, linking multiple supplier applications to a single agreement. This eliminates duplication, reduces administrative overhead, and accurately reflects the structure of GenPro’s commercial relationships.

Semi-Automated Financial Reconciliation OPTIMA transitions the financial reconciliation process between GenPro’s members and suppliers from manual to semi-automated. The system applies matching logic that previously required significant manual effort, improving both the speed and accuracy of reconciliation cycles while creating a clean, auditable financial record.

Invoice Generation Invoices — including Brokerage Fee invoices — are generated directly from completed reconciliations, creating a traceable link between the reconciliation process and the billing documents raised. Manual translation of reconciled data into invoices is eliminated entirely.

Compliance & Alerts OPTIMA actively monitors critical compliance events and surfaces them before they become operational problems — including certificate expirations, agreement anniversary dates, and price validity expirations. The alert system ensures that nothing is missed, regardless of the volume of suppliers and agreements in the system.

Reporting & Analytics Front-end dashboards provide commercial and management teams with drill-down visibility into turnover, sales, and pricing data, parsed at line-item level — delivering the insight they need without manual data extraction or spreadsheet consolidation.

Governed User Access A department-based permissions matrix controls functional access per user role, ensuring sensitive financial and commercial data is seen only by those who need it, and that each team operates within a clearly defined and enforced scope.

Impact

The deployment of OPTIMA delivered measurable improvements across GenPro’s procurement and accounts operations. Supplier onboarding became consistent and auditable for the first time, with every supplier assessed through the same standardised process regardless of category or region. Financial reconciliation — previously one of the most labour-intensive manual processes in the business — became a governed, semi-automated workflow, reducing cycle time and significantly lowering the risk of discrepancy.

The compliance alert system removed the operational risk of missed certificate expirations and agreement deadlines, replacing informal tracking with an automated, system-driven process. And the one-to-many agreement architecture eliminated a structural inefficiency that had created unnecessary duplication across GenPro’s commercial records.

Across the business, teams that had previously worked with separate tools and informal processes were unified within a single platform — each operating with the access and visibility appropriate to their role, and contributing to a shared, accurate record of GenPro’s procurement activity.

Conclusion

OPTIMA demonstrates what becomes possible when a software partner takes the time to genuinely understand a domain before writing a line of code. The one-to-many agreement structure, the department-level permissions matrix, the direct link between reconciliation and invoice generation — these are not features that come from a generic procurement template. They are the product of deep immersion in how maritime group procurement actually works.

Developed by Exelia for GenPro, OPTIMA stands as an example of bespoke software engineering at its most precise: a platform built not to approximate a business’s needs, but to fit them exactly. As GenPro continues to grow and the complexity of its procurement operations increases, OPTIMA provides the governed, scalable foundation to support that growth — without the manual overhead that constrained it before.