Navis excellence centre targets N4 efficiency

Launched in September, the Center of Excellence (CoE) was conceived a year ago as part of a partnership between Navis and CSP and will offer dedicated Navis and CSP resources for N4 projects, supporting content governance, platform management, IT, knowledge and skills management and change management.

Bruce Jacquemard, chief customer officer of Navis, said: The Centre of Excellence brings a dedicated Navis team of experts that are full time dedicated to the COSCO initiative, that cover functions from training to project management to standard consulting, product customisation and customer development.”

Autonomy goal

He explained the team from Navis is complemented by a team from COSCO so that each project team will become more educated and as their experience grows they will need fewer Navis resources.

“It’s really to enable them to gain the experience to drive multiple projects globally, in parallel. And at the same time be able to take a prominent role in all activities,” he clarified.

Four CoE projects are underway in COSCO terminals so far, at Zeebrugge and Valencia in Europe and at two terminals in China. More projects are due to be introduced before the end of 2018.

“The trends particularly with global terminal operators is to look at how they can standardise processes and procedures across their entire footprint globally,” stressed Mr Jacquemard. “COSCO are very aggressive in acquiring new terminals around the world and is certainly growing aggressively in China.”

To get to a point where they can drive consistency and efficiency, COSCO have a goal of bringing their teams up to speed as they standardise with the Navis N4 product as a solution that they’re implementing in acquired or greenfield terminals, he stated.

Navis anticipate that over time, other services it provides will become part of the centre to provide additional capabilities.

The centre is currently planned to run indefinitely and the initiative has been proposed to other organisations with a similar structure with the expectation that the centre concept can be rolled out.