Port of Dover, the United Kingdom’s busiest international ferry port, is using Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite to support its mission to facilitate seamless travel, trade, and visitor experiences. With the help of an integrated suite of cloud applications to manage finance, HR, and supply chain processes, Port of Dover has been able to increase productivity, reduce costs, and enhance the employee experience.

In operation since 1606, Port of Dover plays an integral role in the UK’s international trade and tourism, handling £144 billion of trade in goods and over three million freight and tourist vehicles each year. As part of its long-term plan to increase capacity by 20 percent and become the UK's most seamless, sustainable, and technology-enabled port, Port of Dover needed to replace its aging business systems that were complex, costly, and inefficient. To increase productivity and enable workers to take advantage of the latest advancements in AI, Port of Dover consolidated business processes in the cloud with Oracle Fusion Applications.

“We play a critical role in enabling travel and trade between the UK and Europe – which has become increasingly complex with dynamic trade conditions. To better manage this complexity, we needed to eliminate manual processes and embrace automation in the cloud,” said Chris Hughes, business transformation director, Port of Dover. “Oracle Fusion Applications Suite has enabled us to streamline critical business processes and harness embedded AI capabilities to increase productivity, reduce costs, and better support the flow of trade across the UK and beyond.”

With the help of Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Port of Dover has been able to eliminate manual processes and accelerate financial insights to increase efficiency, enhance decision-making, and improve financial controls. It has also been able to achieve an 85 percent reduction in purchasing process queries and has reduced the time taken to complete month-end reporting by 20 percent by streamlining processes in Oracle Cloud ERP. With Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM), Port of Dover has centralised HR operations on a single platform to help improve the employee experience and generate better workforce insights. In addition, Oracle Fusion Cloud Supply Chain & Manufacturing (SCM) has enabled Port of Dover to automate procure-to-pay and supplier management processes to improve operational efficiency, minimise costs and risk, and increase profitability.

“In an era of growing trade complexity and supply chain disruptions, ports cannot afford to be weighed down by time-consuming manual operations,” said Guy Armstrong, senior vice president of applications, Oracle UK and Ireland. “With Oracle Fusion Applications, Port of Dover has standardised on a single integrated suite that enables it to embrace the latest AI innovations to increase productivity, expand insights, and improve workforce management as it facilitates travel and trade on behalf of the UK.”

Port of Dover’s implementation was supported by Mastek and Shape Associates.