Some 800 million shipping containers crisscross the globe every year, but only about half make it to their destinations on time. The reason delivery performance is so erratic is because the global shipping industry has grown up in local silos, each with its own set of operating standards and information needs. Shipping companies, terminal operators and regulators have cobbled together their own solutions, but there is no consistent way to track a shipping container from the time it leaves a factory in Guangzhou until it arrives at a rail yard in Cleveland.

“Shipping is not a closed loop,” said Dave McCandless (right), vice president of information technology at Navis LLC. “Containers that miss their destination are a problem. Automation can change that. Containers need to start telling equipment where they need to go.”

Image courtesy of Navis

You can bet that when they do, Navis will be there. For 25 years the company has provided operational technologies that help the world’s leading terminal operators improve efficiency and visibility into their operations. Now it’s gaining new insight into its own operations – and it may be able to cut new IT spending by half next year as a result.

Navis’ main product is sophisticated logistical software Named N4 that the company calls a “terminal operating system.” N4 helps operators coordinate and optimize planning and management of containers and equipment across one or many terminals and locations within a single instance.

Each Navis customer has a unique environment, a fact that drives a lot of IT spending on Navis’ part. For customization and troubleshooting purposes, the company emulates a subset of each customer’s environment in its own data center. It typically runs 30 to 40 virtual machines for any given customer, along with a suite of financial and operational software. The objective is to be able to duplicate as precisely as possible any issues that are unique to an individual customers’ situation.

To say the least, “We have a very complex environment to manage,” McCandless said.

Monitoring at a high level

Navis recently brought in software from OpsDataStore Inc. to help improve visibility into its infrastructure and improve efficiency. Legacy system monitoring tools “will tell you how your operations are performing, but won’t give you an easy way to manage the utilization from a business perspective,” McCandless said.

In contrast, OpsDataStore’s technology provides a common data plane for a holistic view of hardware, software, application and network usage across the infrastructure. Rather than reporting on the details of each disk array and server, the software monitors overall performance and enables managers to drill down to individual components for troubleshooting. “The beauty is that the view isn’t based on knowing a lot about each element behind the application,” McCandless said. “It’s a correlation based on the performance of all of them.”

Although the project is still in its early stages, McCandless said he foresees cost savings of as much as half in next year’s budget thanks to improved visibility. “OpsDataStore lets us look at utilization across our resources and see what are peak demand times,” he said. “We can build a utilization model that optimizes our resources.”

Part of the savings comes from better scheduling. Prior to gaining improved visibility into its operations, the company ran most computing jobs during weekday business hours, which resulted in delays and performance hits. OpsDataStore gave Navis the ability to divide the week into 168 hourly slices and to match workloads to availability and need. “Instead of running a job on Tuesday night we can run Saturday morning,” when more resources are available, McCandless said. That not only eases backlogs but reduces demand for power and people.

Single dashboard

Using a management reporting dashboard from Birst Inc., Navis’ IT organization can now deliver more precise details on how resources are being allocated to projects and customers. “We can know in real time what we spent for employees, contractors and IT resources,” McCandless said. “That means we can monitor utilization, optimize our costs, and lower costs to customers.”

Additional savings will be achieved by identifying software licenses that are unused or underused and even cutting down on software-as-a-service (SaaS) licenses. McCandless noted that a new wrinkle IT organizations must deal with is per-user licensing of SaaS services, which requires users to sign up for a full license even if all they need is a small extract of the data in the application. “We can reduce the number of subscriptions per user if we’re just looking for data,” he said. “I can get the data but the whole license won’t be necessary.”

Navis is encouraging customers to move to the cloud and expects OpsDataStore to pay off there as well. The software easily accommodates new sources of data, such as the NetScout Systems Inc. network monitoring system the company favors, and that integration extends to the cloud as well.

“As I move my internal operations to the cloud I’ve got the capability to monitor both internal and external resources,” McCandless said. “I’m getting visibility and not worrying about internal infrastructure.”

Featured image by ShnapThat! via Flickr CC