For much of the past decade, digital change in the maritime industry has been driven by large programmes: ERP upgrades, terminal operating systems, port community platforms. These initiatives remain important, but they are costly, slow to deliver and increasingly difficult to justify against tightening operational and environmental pressures.

What is changing is not the ambition to improve but how improvement is being delivered.

Across ports, terminal operators and maritime service organisations, continuous improvement is increasingly being driven by platforms already in place, most notably Microsoft 365.

Maritime decision makers face a familiar set of constraints: rising compliance demands, asset heavy operations, labour shortages and the need to demonstrate measurable efficiency gains. At the same time, tolerance for disruption is low.

In this context, organisations are placing greater emphasis on extracting value from existing business software subscriptions, rather than continually adding new systems.

Microsoft 365, long positioned as a productivity tool, is increasingly being viewed as a modern workplace platform capable of supporting operational discipline and continuous improvement when implemented correctly.

Most maritime organisations already hold Microsoft 365 licences. Fewer have optimised how those licences are configured, governed and aligned to operational needs.

This distinction is driving demand for our dedicated advisory services for office software subscriptions. Our focus is not on selling licences, but on helping organisations understand how tools such as Power Apps, Power Automate and Power BI can be applied safely and effectively in complex, regulated environments.

Best practices for migrating to a modern workplace platform

For organisations moving beyond basic email and document collaboration, migration to a modern workplace platform is less about technical cutover and more about process design.

Best practices increasingly observed across the maritime sector include:

starting with operational use cases rather than IT-led feature rollouts

establishing clear data ownership and governance early

integrating Microsoft 365 tools with ERP systems rather than duplicating functionality

enabling gradual adoption to reduce operational risk

These approaches reduce disruption while allowing teams to embed continuous improvement into daily workflows. A key concern for ports and operators running 24/7 operations.

Formalising operational knowledge

One of the most persistent barriers to improvement in maritime operations is reliance on tacit knowledge. Processes work because individuals know how they work, not because systems enforce them.

Power Apps has increasingly been used to convert that knowledge into structured tools: inspection apps, asset condition reporting, incident logging and handover workflows. When implemented with advisory oversight, these tools improve consistency without locking organisations into rigid solutions.

For many operators, this represents the first step towards repeatable, measurable improvement.

Automation as operational governance

Power Automate is often described in terms of efficiency, but in maritime environments, its primary value is governance. Automated approvals, alerts and escalation paths reduce reliance on informal workarounds.

Advisory-led improvement

What distinguishes successful implementations is rarely the software. It is the presence of advisory capability specialists who understand both the platform and the operating context.

As a result, the market is seeing increased demand for UK-based advisory firms specialising in cloud productivity suites, particularly those able to link Microsoft 365 capability to measurable operational outcomes.

For maritime decision-makers searching for insight rather than technology hype, the message is increasingly clear: continuous improvement is no longer driven by programmes alone, but by platforms and by the expertise applied to them.