Octopi by Navis gives general cargo better productivity

Cost Efficiency 

Improving productivity is essential to reducing costs and to generate more volume in smaller general cargo terminals. Director Castera explained two main ways to AJOT.  “Octopi reduces back office data entry work to once with friendly interfaces in real-time.  Some of our customers have processes that would take them a whole day and are now converted to a 15-minute process in Octopi. The second way is better transparency in “building a culture of KPIs” on-site by the BI dashboard in Octopi. “You basically apply gamification to terminal operating processes. People start to compete with themselves to beat their numbers and that culture of statistics makes a huge improvement to your productivity,” he said.  

Octopi offers a set of new features and updates. The reefer (refrigerated container) BI dashboard now shows a visual in colors:  which reefers have not had monitoring for temperatures recently, which reefers have abnormal readings and which reefers are scheduled to arrive soon at the terminal to better prepare.  All Octopi features translate into cost savings.

“A customer took a whole week to go through tons of spreadsheets and to produce invoices to charge for a general cargo storage at their terminal.  We automated that process to zero minutes,” exclaimed Director Castera.  Another cost savings was found in a customer reconciling their vessel tallies with the shipping agents by comparing two tally sheets row by row.  “We built a way for the shipping agents to have access to Octopi and verify each tally moved reconciled by the terminal in real-time so that at the end of the operation, the reconciliation is automatically completed and they can get paid,” stated Director Castera. Finally, with tighter inventory controls, customers have less claims and pay less in penalties.  

At present, Octopi by Navis has implementations in 13 sites and 7 countries.  In the second half of this year, Octopi signed a subscription agreement for Octopi by Navis with Tropical Shipping in St. Thomas that has 1500 short tons of general cargo and 95,000 twenty equivalent unit (TEU) containers throughput per year.  Octopi will improve inventory accuracy, operation efficiencies and visibility with direct access to ports in the United States of America, Canada and the Virgin Islands.  Also, Port Fernandina, northeast Florida, signed an agreement in their modernization project by Worldwide Terminals Fernandina to implement Octopi for better vessel planning and to attract new liners as well as tracking of cargoes by truck, vessel, rail and share real-time data by electronic data interchange (EDI) with customers.  The Port has 300,000 tons of breakbulk cargo per year now near the South Atlantic in Fernandina Beach, Florida.  

Earlier this year, Octopi went live in three months from spreadsheet-based pen and paper system at the Port International Du Cap Haitien. The Port went from manual process inaccuracies to automated inventory tracking. Other improvements were  individuals mapping the yard with Octopi graphic representation and the ability to handle EDI manifests and vessel cargo information. 

Director Castera concluded the webinar by giving a demonstration of the discharge of breakbulk general cargo at a port terminal in real-time on the “pending tallies” page in Octopi. He first created a new yard to store the general cargo by pallets in the graphic representation “satellite view” page on Octopi. Details of each terminal operation are easily learned and viewed on the platform by crane name, items discharged such as 140 boxes of Amazon Kindles, 2 pallets of rum, 2 drums of clothes, and 5 bundles of rebar. The mapped-out yard area on the platform page is where the tallies such as an allocation of 20 Amazon Kindle boxes would be inventoried in the yard and by “splitting and merging” functionality of the diverse cargo discharged from the vessel.