The Navis stowage planning tool, StowMan, has been upgraded with the Navis Control Center and Distributed Services as the company announced the first customer for the enhanced application.
Danish feeder carrier, Unifeeder, 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, according to a Navis announcement.
The Navis Control Center and Distributed Services provide a scalable framework to transform the stand-alone tool StowMan, into a connected client-server setup, while maintaining full offline planning capabilities.
“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,” said 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.”
According to the company, more than 50 carriers and logistics providers, including more than a third of the top ten ocean carriers with 3,000+ users worldwide, stow their vessels with StowMan or Capstan.