Navis wishes for better integration knowledge

“If I had a magic wand I would wish the industry to have more discussion around the need to invest in testing, in system integration best practises and in IT infrastructure,” said Andy Barrons, vice president and chief marketing officer, Navis. “This is going to be increasingly important with integrated terminals.

“The level of sophistication is very high so you want the operators to understand the software and understand the capabilities of the software and not just see a black box.”

Sumitha Sampath, Navis director of product marketing, described automation as an “innovation arms race”, adding that there is now a wide variety of equipment being used to automate terminals, challenging the capability of legacy software systems.

For its part, Navis has invested in implementation of best practices, on processes to remove risk from projects, and on identifying risks beyond the Navis component.

It is also set to launch a Business Intelligence tool on a limited release in October, with the official release planned for the first half of 2015. The software specialist describes this as a “flexible tool to measure performance”. Frederik Stork, director of a new unit tasked with optimisation, will oversee the new BI tool.