sea chefs cruise
  • May.3.2023

sea chefs supplies passengers with the help of Jira

  • May.3.2023
  • Reading time mins

With the combination of standard procurement software and the flexible Jira-based purchase order broker, sea chefs can continue its fast growth, and accomplish full transparency in its interactions with vendors. The flexibility of Jira allows for fast modifications and adaptation to new and international suppliers.

Abstract

The sea chefs group of companies with its head office in Switzerland is one of the cruise industry’s worldwide leading service providers. It offers hotel, restaurant and crew management for both ocean-going and river cruise vessels.

Currently, sea chefs has approximately 15,000 employees on board the more than 50 ocean-going and river cruise vessels they manage, plus 180 employees at the various sea chefs offices in Basel and Zug in Switzerland, Limassol in Cyprus, Valletta in Malta, as well as Hamburg and Berlin in Germany.

sea chefs is working on the efficient implementation and realization of the ideas and plans developed in close cooperation with its business partners and customers on the seven seas and in addition to various rivers in Europe and Asia.

Challenge

sea chefs provides hotel operation services for more than 50 ocean-going and river cruise vessels. An important part of ensuring day-to-day hotel operations is the management of the supply chain for the vessels.

With ships all around the globe that are constantly changing itineraries, the challenge to ensure a working supply chain is tremendous.

Solution

Valiantys, one of Germany’s leading Atlassian Platinum Solution partners, has helped sea chefs implement a flexible and centralized procurement platform in which Jira acts as the broker between the central procurement software and global suppliers. This set-up provides a flexible foundation to the ever-changing needs of sea chef’s procurement process.

Sea chefs procurement officers (based in Hamburg and Cyprus) use purpose-built tools to issue purchase orders from the central procurement system via Jira to the various international suppliers. Jira is then used to exchange and update information related to such purchase orders providing a full audit trail on all interactions with the supplier.

Therefore, sea chefs and Valiantys held various workshops to align future data structure that would fit both source and target systems. After the data structure was set, Valiantys’ technical experts utilized Jira’s REST API to set up an automated data exchange between the source systems and Jira itself, while Valiantys’ Atlassian Implementation Specialists configured the necessary changes in Jira.

The process itself is designed around two major use cases: management of the internal procurement from vessels to sea chefs procurement, as well as the handling of vendors and logistics.

In a nutshell, we utilized Jira Software and certain apps from the Atlassian marketplace to:

  • create necessary templates (Purchase Order as PDF for the vendors + Excel list of products, delivery information, daily report) with Xporter by Xpand IT,
  • orchestrate email communication between the various stakeholders fully automated with “Email This Issue for Jira” by META-INF,
  • customize workflows for incoming orders that include validation upon reception (missing info, wrong email format, etc) with Scriptrunner by Adaptavist,
  • automate workflows wherever possible to reduce manual efforts with Scriptrunner,
  • generate documents based on templates automatically with Xporter,
  • configure scheduled reports sent to different logistic companies

The solution is a Valiantys managed service in AWS. This Cloud offer allows customers to conveniently benefit from the Atlassian Data Center and Server products. We manage the complete stack and ensure that everything is up and running smoothly, and GDPR compliant in ISO27001 certified data centers.

Benefits

Digitizing another part of the supply chain with Jira, improved everyday business operations as currently:

  • ~200 orders are sent automatically to Jira per day
  • 20-30 comments by suppliers per day
  • ~600 documents generated automatically in various formats per day

Has this use case made you curious? Valiantys is your Atlassian Platinum Solution Partner – contact us now to discuss your case. We will support you in digitizing your processes with Jira and other Atlassian applications. We look forward to hearing from you.


The sea chefs group of companies with its head office in Switzerland is one of the cruise industry’s worldwide leading service providers. It offers hotel, restaurant and crew management for both ocean-going and river cruise vessels.

Currently, sea chefs has approximately 15,000 employees on board the more than 50 ocean-going and river cruise vessels they manage, plus 180 employees at the various sea chefs offices in Basel and Zug in Switzerland, Limassol in Cyprus, Valletta in Malta, as well as Hamburg and Berlin in Germany.

sea chefs is working on the efficient implementation and realization of the ideas and plans developed in close cooperation with its business partners and customers on the seven seas and in addition to various rivers in Europe and Asia.