Ben Line
Founded in 1825, the Ben Line Group is a leading privately-owned maritime logistics and agency company headquartered in Singapore. The company operates in 18 countries with over 130 offices worldwide, providing liner agency services, marine solutions, and integrated logistics for global shipping and offshore clients.
As Ben Line celebrated its 200th anniversary in 2025, it remains committed to modernising its operations through digitalisation and sustainability, ensuring resilience and competitiveness in the ever-evolving maritime and logistics landscape.
The project challenge centred on transforming Ben Line’s procurement function from a transactional support role into a strategic enabler of operational excellence within a highly regulated maritime environment.
Fragmented Procurement Landscape: Disparate procurement practices across categories limited standardisation, visibility, and value optimisation across the organisation.
Regulatory and Commercial Alignment: Procurement strategies needed to balance cost efficiency with strict compliance to IMO and ILO requirements, ensuring operational integrity without compromising regulatory obligations.
Data and Benchmarking Constraints: Limited data availability and contextual differences across global maritime and logistics players created challenges in benchmarking and performance comparison.
Category-Specific Complexity: High-volatility and regulation-sensitive categories such as Crew Movement and Ocean Freight required nuanced strategies to manage cost fluctuations, stakeholder dependencies, and service continuity.
Strategic Capability Uplift: The organisation faced the broader challenge of embedding governance, category management discipline, and performance metrics to elevate procurement into a value-generating function aligned with long-term business objectives.
Prior to the project, Ben Line’s procurement is decentralised, predominantly manual processes, resulting in restricted oversight of limited supplier spend an performance. The lack of digital solutions and ESG-focused policies limited both efficiency and opportunities to generate strategic impact. The SMU-XL team undertook extensive research - leveraging CIPS, IMO, and ILO frameworks, along with competitor benchmarking and best practices from maritime industry procurement related literatures, to develop a customised transformation roadmap that addresses Ben Line’s specific readiness and needs.
The team proposed a three-phase roadmap to elevate Ben Line’s procurement maturity from foundation to integration and Leadership. Key recommendations include:
- Establishing a centralised Procurement Centre of Excellence (CoE) for governance and compliance, Supplier segmentation, and SRM framework.
- Implementing an Enterprise Procurement Platform (EPP) integrated with ERP for end-to-end automation.
- Introducing ESG Dashboard reporting aligned with IMO decarbonisation targets and ILO labour standards.
Strategic Roadmap Overview
- Phase 1 (0–12 months): Procurement readiness assessment, Supplier Code of Conduct, SRM setup.
- Phase 2 (6–12 months): Implement ERP/e-procurement, Digital governance dashboards.
- Phase 3 (12–18 months): Analytics hub, sustainability partnerships, ESG procurement framework.
The project delivered significant and multifaceted benefits:
Strengthened Procurement Governance Foundations: A comprehensive capability assessment, formalised Supplier Code of Conduct (CoC), and structured Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) processes now anchor procurement within a clear governance framework aligned to IMO and ILO standards.
Enhanced Regulatory and Ethical Compliance: Embedding sustainability clauses into contracts and integrating ESG requirements into supplier onboarding reduces compliance risk while reinforcing responsible and ethical sourcing practices.
Improved Transparency and Supplier Oversight: Digital audit mechanisms and structured supplier evaluations provide greater visibility into supplier performance, labour practices, and regulatory adherence across procurement categories.
Data-Driven Transformation Enablement: Insights from global benchmarking established a clear maturity baseline and informed a targeted roadmap focused on governance centralisation, digital integration, and ESG-linked sourcing.
Technology-Enabled Operational Efficiency: The proposed Enterprise Procurement Platform unifies sourcing, tendering, contract management, and spend analytics, while AI-driven RFQ automation and RPA streamline transactional processes to reduce cycle times and manual inefficiencies.
Tamper-Proof Accountability and Risk Control: Blockchain-enabled audit trails and advanced analytics strengthen traceability, mitigate fraud risks, and support defensible audit readiness.
Embedded ESG Integration Across the Value Chain: ESG scorecards, climate impact measurement, and sustainability-linked performance tracking harmonise procurement practices with IMO greenhouse gas reduction goals and the UN SDGs, elevating procurement into a strategic sustainability lever.
Real-Time Performance Monitoring and Continuous Improvement: Advanced dashboards and KPI tracking—covering non-compliant spend, supplier ESG adoption rates, and cycle time reductions—empower leadership with actionable insights to proactively manage risk and drive measurable progress.
Future-Ready Procurement Excellence: By integrating ERP solutions, digital technologies, and sustainability governance into core operations, Ben Line positions procurement as a strategic value driver—strengthening resilience, competitiveness, and long-term operational excellence in the global maritime industry.
We (Ben Line) are delighted to be the first organisation to partner with SMU on an industry-related procurement project with their experiential Learning SMU-XL(Lifelong) Faculty Industry Practice Master Digital Economy Team.
Thank you to the SMU Professors Venky Shankararaman & Gary Pan and team members Russell Ghem Ming Kong, Geraldine Gan, Lim Choong Chiang and Lim San-San for the insightful project conclusions and outcomes. These will be put to good use on our transformation journey. A special thank you to the SMU-XL team, Kevin Koh, Lyndon Teoh, and Gloria Zhang, for working with us to make this happen.
Jan Piskadlo, Chief Procurement Officer, Ben Lin
