Maritech Orion – a CAI Software Solution - is built within and is an extension of Microsoft Business Central. In addition to the robust core ERP functionality offered by Microsoft Business Central, Maritech Orion includes a highly developed and progressive suite of industry-specific modules which allow seafood companies to purchase a fully customized for seafood operations ERP solution at an affordable turnkey price.

The Inventory module is core to Maritech Orion and ensures that seafood companies can comply with both regulatory and enhanced retailer traceability requirements. While Business Central only allows for serial number item tracking for a quantity of one, Orion is modeled for weight units of measure so that, for example, a purchase of 1000 lbs. of fish can be serial and lot tracked as a single item inventory entry. This level of tracking also enhances the allocation functionality of Business Central, which normally allocates inventory to a sale from within a lot rather than from a specific lot tracked item ledger entry. The enhanced item tracking functionality of Maritech Orion means that you can track very specific item entry ledgers with additional attributes without the need for many extra steps of data entry selection.

Select Open Inventory pages that accompany every allocation performed within Orion, which appears as seamless to Business Central operations, allow you to painlessly capture and maintain all seafood-specific traceability attributes (vessel, catch date, and more) as a natural part of the sales flow.

To further enhance rapid data entry for fast-paced seafood sales operations, customer purchase history fact boxes show all recent sales transactions for a customer. Salespersons can bring an item into the order from past history with a single click.

The Item Tracking enhancements offered by Maritech Orion are not limited to enhanced traceability and ease of use. These adjustments mean that financial transactions can also be tracked and managed in real time for actual landed profitability calculations per order while still accounting for inventory valuation using traditional inventory costing methods: FIFO, LIFO, or Average.

Business Central does not support catch weight functionality natively. The core unit of measure functionality in Business Central requires a single base unit of measure definition against which all other measures are defined and converted. This means that you are essentially limited to sales of fixed weight cases if you sell by case and price by weight. Although there are a multitude of app extensions for Business Central that provide solutions for catch weight, they almost all require at least basic warehouse module receiving and a scale integration.

Maritech Orion provides a flexible case unit of measure solution that is completely independent of the base Business Central Unit of measure definitions. You can define per item whether or not the item is fixed or variable weight. If fixed weight, then the case definition will match the defined weight quantity. If variable, the number of cases can be defined independently of weight. Weight quantities can be entered by a scale or manually. For added flexibility, you can sell a quantity of variable weight cases and bring the weight quantity into the line as an average from multiple individual case lines.

Fishing is an add-on module that is integrated with core Business Central inventory and accounting. Fishing Functionality can be used to settle fishing trips for both your own vessel fleet and for externally owned vessels for which you have buyer’s agreements. Functionality includes:

Fisher Settlement can be integrated with Business Central’s Serenic payroll extension to register settlement into Serenic payroll or can be used stand alone with the settlement sent to an excel file for use with a different payroll system.

The Maritech Orion Production module enhances the already robust core Business Central manufacturing functionality, optimizing it for primary processing. While Business Central offers advanced costing and production planning per workstation and route, Maritech Orion provides the specialty planning and production scheduling needed for seafood production. Production planning for a seafood operation - allocating incoming raw material amongst a set of final products - is a complicated task. Seafood processing operations produce co-products, waste products, and product variations, all of which must be managed to optimize revenue and to meet the demand for different grades and forms of product. Unlike other food sectors, the incoming catch size and quality is usually not precisely known until it actually arrives at the processing facility.

While Business Central uses a traditional Materials Requirements Planning (MRP) model to automate the re-order point, production planning and scheduling functions, and automatic flushing of raw material inventory used in production, this logic simply does not work for most seafood producers. The fundamental reason for this failure is that an MRP system identifies the lead time needed to order component materials as the main production constraint. These ERP systems therefore model production based on an assembled Bill of Materials (BOM) which is essentially a product recipe built upon the premise that combinations of uniform raw materials are added together to collectively create a product; many items (parts) make one end item, like two tires go on a bicycle.

A primary processor of seafood does the reverse - one item is processed into many items. A top-grade 10- to 12-pound fish, for example, goes in whole at one end and comes out the other as a value-added product. The fish is processed in stages — from skin-on fillet, to skin-off fillet, to portions, to seasoned portions — and at any stage it can be turned into a finished product. These environments absolutely need the ability to model disassembly and assembly, sometimes simultaneously, and therefore need specialized BOM constructions.

If you, for example, produce a box of cod fillets, there is no way of specifying in advance the exact weight or quantity of cod needed to produce the box. This means that each time a box of cod fillets is produced there is no way for the system to automatically reduce the cod stock as would be possible for tires if you were producing bicycles. In seafood, you need to be able to set instead estimates regarding how much cod should be used (and the average yield you would expect to achieve).You must then also be able to easily adjust the estimates with the correct amount of raw material actually used to produce each lot or batch of final product every time or your inventory quantity and value will never be correct.

The Maritech Orion Production module can accommodate regular value added food assembly as well as disassembly, allowing a whole fish to be broken out into its component multi-staged products and then built up into conventional ready meal portions, tracking yield at each stage. The system allows you to break down raw material usage by percentage but allocate the costs of those cuts differently from the percentage yield, allowing you to apportion more of the cost to the higher value output while quickly creating and honing effective, realistic, and flexible production schedules.