Pivotal to new product – Viking Systems
Harbour Assist is a new harbour management system conceived, designed and built by Viking Systems, which is based in Lostwithiel. The system is used in three of the biggest harbours in the South West, Fowey, Dartmouth and Padstow.
Founding Director Nick Gill says: “Superfast broadband has been pivotal to our launch of Harbour Assist. Most harbours operate with a central PC based system meaning that boat-owners need to walk into the office to request services, and there is no easy way for remote team members to look at a customer’s record. Superfast business broadband has allowed us to create a revolutionary product that brings significant improvements. Now harbour staff can remain fully mobile on the water, interacting with and taking payment from customers in real time through a fully-automated online-self-service system, based in the cloud.”
Nick continues: “Our cloud-based solution delivers excellent reliability without the need for harbours to invest in costly hardware. Superfast also enables us to upload to our cloud infrastructure in a vastly reduced time, improving our own productivity. This is important as we charge per month which includes perpetual upgrades, hosting and backups.
“From internal communications to deployment and refinement of the system, superfast broadband cuts down on one of the most costly elements of any business – time. Change happens faster, so we can change things more often, at less expense – all to the benefit of our customers and our business.
“We realised that only harbour staff can really give us the operational expertise to help us build a product that delivers the efficiencies we had in mind. In order to make sure we built it right first time, we partnered with Fowey Harbour Commissioners to help design and feedback into early prototypes. Because of superfast broadband, it was fast and straightforward to implement all changes as a result of their customer feedback.”
Nick concludes: “Our entirely online model is a unique and radically different approach that brings our customers huge cost and time saving benefits. Without fibre broadband, and the cloud infrastructure that it opens up to us, we could never have created such a competitive, feature-rich and user-friendly solution. With three leading harbours now using the system, we are looking forward to consolidating this strong base and growing the business significantly over time.”
