Navis ready to cater for automation surge

Speaking with Port Strategy, vice president & chief marketing officer Andy Barrons explained that the advent of bigger ships has prompted a need for increased productivity, which in turn has driven advancements in technology.

“The dynamics of the industry have changed around the economics of larger ships which has had a pass on effect on the industry. From our perspective, when we are looking at automation, projects have come through faster and at a slightly higher volume than we expected. In a way the bigger vessels created a race to automation.”

Describing the trajectory for automation, Mr Barrons said that the industry will continue to see automation projects, but “it will tail off”.

“We’re still talking with customers about automation projects, but I think that it may come down slightly. However, there will still be a steady flow of terminal automation projects,” he said.

For its part, Navis will deliver optimisation to terminals that are automating and roll out that optimisation to semi-automated and then to manual terminals.

“We’ve invested in tremendous talent in PhDs, operations research, and people who have run terminals. Within Navis there is software engineering. We’ve brought them all together in a significant investment,” said Mr Barrons.

Another significant investment area is in business intelligence and analytics designed to help operators to make better use of data to inform decision-making.

“Further out, as we optimise terminal operations we can introduce the cloud and how this can help support the terminal operations. It’s not if we are going to use the cloud, it’s when.”