Navis, a part of Cargotec Corporation, and provider of maritime software solutions for cargo and vessel performance and compliance, announced today at the Navis Carrier and Vessel Solutions’ Customer Conference in Hamburg that the stowage planning tool StowMan has been upgraded with a Navis Control Center and Distributed Services. The Navis Control Center and Distributed Services provide a scalable framework to transform the standalone tool StowMan, into a connected client-server setup, while maintaining full offline planning capabilities. Users will profit from simplified software deployment, effective data processing by standardized data storage and options for automated file handling.
As a leading provider in the field of vessel planning solutions for liner operators, Navis has adopted for StowMan the proven concept of the Control Center and Distributed Services from Capstan, a well-established Navis stowage and network solution used by one of the top ten carriers of the Alphaliner ranking. The automated deployment enables an efficient rollout of new StowMan versions, reduces the efforts in monitoring and replaces any need to manually execute installations for every version. The Control Center serves as the central gateway to all StowMan functionalities, from planning to updates and administration, and provides a personalized vessel and voyage overview.
As one of the initial customers, the Danish feeder carrier Unifeeder, operating a fleet of more than 50 modern container vessels ranging between 350 and 1700 TEU, is now using the StowMan Control Center and Distributed Services for automated file handling and voyage creation to streamline data processing for stowage planning across departments. Files are provided directly from the carrier’s booking system, processed into the related voyage(s) on the server and automatically loaded upon starting StowMan.
“The requirements of ship planning in the feeder business often confronts our ship planners with very frequent updates to stowage plans as they handle many ships and many terminal calls in parallel,” says Christian Jurlander, Operations Manager at Unifeeder.
“Our objective is that planners can focus exclusively on planning rather than administering the working environment. We, therefore, aim to accelerate and optimize the recurring processes of the data workflow.”
“The launch of Control Center and Distributed Services marks an important milestone within the StowMan product evolution from a pure stand-alone tool to a connected IT environment,” said Ajay Bharadwaj, Senior Director Product Management at Navis.
“It is also a further step in realizing the synergies of the unification of the leading stowage planning software solutions StowMan and Capstan under the Navis brand. Building a common basis shared by StowMan and Capstan through this backend will further provide great opportunities to develop joint functionalities and standardized API connections.”
Currently, more than 50 carriers and logistics providers, including more than a third of the top ten ocean carriers with more than 3,000 users worldwide, stow their vessels with StowMan or Capstan. StowMan, along with the integrated MACS3 loading computer, provides the same calculation results as the loading instrument. For key MACS3 calculations such as stability and strength, dangerous goods and lashing are also offered independently of the loading computer or Navis stowage tools via its API Services launched earlier this year, allowing integration into customers’ systems or software.