Customer spotlight with Jonas Pappot, Head of Business Finance at Norden
Jonas, thanks for joining us. Can you tell us about your role at Norden and how you work with Marcura?
"I've been with Norden for almost six years now. I head up Business Finance, which covers all our financial operations, and that means my team is the main customer of DA-Desk.
"DA-Desk is like a playing field for people like me. Invoice flows, cost transparency and authorisation governance. It's what you dream of if you're in financial operations. We're always looking at how we can add more invoices into the flow, whether there are other areas of optimisation that could be developed into the same platform."
Very few partnerships last 22 years. From your perspective, what's made this one stand the test of time?
"What really binds Marcura and Norden is a common curiosity about improving the business we're in.
"Norden has always been a pioneer in our industry, always seeking to optimise everything we do, including financial operations.
"When I first met Christian Haunso, Marcura’s founder, it was clear that this was someone who really understood us. When you work with people who have seen the same problems first-hand, the same cumbersome processes, it changes the conversation.
"We have a strong agenda for digitalisation at Norden. Christian had a clear vision of what needed to change in the industry based on his time in shipping operations. When those two sides connect, you have the foundation for a strong partnership.
"There’s a real sense that we’re in this together."
When you say we’re in this together, what do you mean by that?
"It's not us telling you, or you telling us. It's this thinking of co-creation, finding the right solutions together. What's the real-world problem? Let's have a common understanding of that, then come up with a solution.
"The willingness to take time to sit down, listen, discuss and develop in the pursuit of a better product. That matters.
"Shipping is an industry in constant development and will be for many years. Technology software, AI agents, new fuels types, we're only seeing the tip of the iceberg of what's coming.
"Partnering with an organisation that understands this and is ready to adapt, is really important. I can point to other vendors who aren't there, and you can see how challenging it is to work with organisations like that."
How does DA-Desk help your team navigate the operational pressures you're dealing with today?
"For us, flexibility matters a lot.
"Trading volume is part of our model. Some days we have around 400 vessels on the water. Other days it’s closer to 500. It depends on the market.
"Volatility right now is significant, and sometimes the right move is to wait a bit before scaling up or down. With DA-Desk, we can do that without locking ourselves into a large, fixed cost base in Finance. The pay-as-you-go model makes sense.
"At a management level, we don’t spend much time debating the cost base day to day. We know we pay when we use it and when we’re getting value from it.
"There’s also a people aspect to it. We don’t want our teams spending time on work that doesn’t necessarily require a human interaction. You still see shipowners who prefer to hire large teams just to manually key invoices. That's not the way we want to use our employees at Norden.
"The system approach, the structured data, it lets our people work on things that create real value."
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How important is it to have DA-Desk integrated with your other operational systems?
"It’s critical.
"We’re quite strict on this internally. If data slows decision-making down, something isn’t right. Admin should be minimal. The mantra we aspire to is that everything you need should be one click away.
"If you have to jump between systems just to pull together a single view, that context-switching becomes messy very quickly. Try making a trade with ten browser tabs open, switching back and forth, you lose time, and you lose focus and potentially even trading margins.
"Fast decisions need stable integrations. Having that in place, being able to redirect to the right places, importing data back into the system, having all your views in one place, that's what enables us to run a tight operation."
Norden also uses PortLog. What value does that bring?
"We see PortLog a knowledge bank. It ensures we're all aligned and on the same page before going into a certain port, these are the overall risks, the things to be aware of.
"What you do with that information, how you trade it, that's up to the charterer. But from a risk mitigation perspective, it adds a lot of value.
"Norden's philosophy is that the more pieces of information we can gather, the better trade we can make. That's why we use DA-Desk, PortLog, and other systems and why we were willing to be first movers. Combining all those pieces of information is what makes you a good trader.
"We were cautious at first about putting our data into the Marcura platform. But trading is about information, and as more customers came on board, we saw the benefit: data points flowing in that we didn't have, port insights we hadn't seen before.
"Someone has to jump first to build that flywheel. We were willing to take that leap, and it paid off."
Where do you see opportunities to go next?
"I’d love to look further along the value chain.
"Hires could be one example. We’re often dealing with the same owners repeatedly. If there were a way to streamline those hire reconciliation flows end-to-end, I’d be interested straight away.
"Customers have different demands of course, but with Marcura’s master data system you could set up invoice templates once per customer and route entire hire reconciliation processes automatically. Is it low hanging fruit? I don’t know, but it’s also not unrealistic."
Is there anything else you'd like to leave readers with?
"We should remember what brought us to this position and stay with the same values for the next 10, 20 years.
"When one of us stops being that curious partner, that's when we move away from a partnership and it becomes a simpler customer-vendor relationship. And that's not as fun.
"Norden will always be a pioneer in trying new things, it is in our DNA. We'll give our opinions and feedback, and we'll try to create value together.
"Sometimes it works, other times it doesn't. But when we sit together in a meeting, it takes half an hour before ideas are bursting across the room.
"I like that energy when we co-create and I’m certain this partnership will continue to generate fresh ideas that will improve our industry. Because that’s the kind of people we are."
"What really binds Marcura and Norden is a common curiosity about improving the business we're in."
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