Web-based management tools for collaboration

The demand for maritime products is characterized by increasing product-complexity, price reduction, price transparency, company spanning offers and increasing competitiveness. For survival under difficult market conditions it is necessary to face up to these requirements. The suppliers are forced to re-configure their collaboration processes towards shipyards and sub-suppliers to achieve competitiveness. The shipyards and the major suppliers are demanding products with fewer interfaces and less coordination for implementation into modern ships and major products. Companies are changing their product portfolio and the ability to act on demand. Especially small and medium sized companies collaborate with other companies and are combining related products together. Analysing the collaboration process it has shown that the organisational and technological processes are badly coordinated. Project-workflow, resoruce-allocation and data-exchange have the main influence on coordination and are highly responsible for successful production. Supporting the main influence factors will achieve high economic growth. Therefore, companies can easily gain benefits by using Web-Based-Management-Tools. These management tools are standardised and provide a wide range of components, including project management, document management and purchase management. Adjusted to the requirements of maritime suppliers these tools can currently be used. The implemented web-based management tools are established and will be discussed in this article. The major opportunities for implementation will be derived and a way will be shown how these tools can work efficiently to achieve a huge benefit for maritime suppliers.