The company was set up in 2001 as a joint venture to vet maritime vessels before they headed out to sea and help establish rigorous standards for the maritime industry to mitigate against the risk of harm to seafarers, the environment, local communities, ships, or their cargoes.
The maritime firm initially achieved this primarily through the manual vetting of vessels by in-house maritime experts. However it later pivoted to an analytics-led approach, which replaced humans with technology. This new approach led to new challenges, including lack of transparency, lack of explainability, and high volatility in recommendations. This resulted in a lack of trust between the firm and its customers as well as the maritime industry.
With its customer base falling away, the firm's core business model was put under threat, requiring an immediate need to turnaround and reconsider every aspect of the business. Its products, services and commercial model, as well as its core operating model, capabilities and ways of working all needed to be reinvented to stabilise the business and build a strong platform for growth.
PwC Australia worked in partnership with the maritime firm to turn around the situation with an end-to-end business strategy that has revitalised and repositioned the business and its future prospects.
The PwC Australia and the PwC South East Asia Consulting team began by listening to customers about their concerns with the firm's existing products and services and agreeing with them a pathway for a set of products and services that combined human and digital expertise. The team then created an end-to-end corporate strategy, holding two board workshops to agree immediate remediation activities. PwC Australia and PwC South East Asia Consulting worked with the client to develop a five year strategy for the business including a wide range of critical actions from helping the company to strike and implement a deal to acquire another company to supporting tax restructuring. The team advised on the design, delivery and replatforming of the core products and services, leveraging human-centred design, cloud architecture data and analytics and a first-principles strategy. The team also worked with the client to create, launch and update the maritime firm's brand and communications.
The reinvention of the business model and supporting operating model has been an outstanding success. The business has not only been saved from either forced exit or wind down, it has returned to double-digit top-line growth every year since its reinvention, thereby protecting both the core business and key customers. The business is now able to attract new talent and the perspective of board members has moved from pessimistic to having an ambitious growth mindset, to the extent that the business is now raising capital to fund future growth.
